Trains that run through buildings and escalators with tolls: ‘The craziest city on the planet’
Expats, globetrotters and influencers are thrilled by the avant-garde, unusual Chinese city of Chongqing. The metropolis genuinely amazes those who visit it for the first time, or who discover its peculiar charms via social media.
The main attractions include a zoo, where giant pandas luxuriate while surrounded by skyscrapers; the public square, built on the roof of a 22-story building; the aerial railway, with one of its main stations inside a block of flats; suspension bridges, which seem to have been brought from the year 2070 to be grafted onto the present; or the resplendent, multicolored skyline, visible from the banks of the Yangtze River. There’s also an improbable aquatic museum, as well as an intricate, seemingly endless labyrinth of escalators that take you down into one of the deepest metro stations in the world.
TikTok and Instagram profiles, YouTube channels and podcasts run by digital nomads compete to unravel the oddities of this crazy city and show them to the rest of the planet. Media outlets — such as CGTN or Wanderplate — have begun to refer to Chongqing as the living incarnation of the city in Blade Runner, or the cyberpunk capital of China. It’s also quite common for it to be referred to as “the craziest city on the planet.”
