Mountain City

My student Co concocted Saturday's walking tour of Chongqing, a mountain city an hour away from Beibei. Though he'd been to the city before, he'd never done the back alleys and neighborhoods accessible only by steep stairs, and he wanted to do all that before taking in the night lights seen from mountains on the other side of the Yangtze River (Jiang Chang). Hiking in the Himalayas hardly prepared me for keeping up with Co, his nose half the time on his smart phone, the rest of the time leading us up circuitous stairways--on and on for about ten hours. The sun does shine in Chongqing, but it was gray and smoggy on Saturday, and, while there are big spectacles to behold, we chose to focus on other things.

For example, we were on our way to the Great Hall when we passed rows of men and women  kneeling on stone stairs, petitioning some uniformed men about something. A number of taxi drivers pulled up and watched. I am conspicuous even in a crowd, and I could see someone at the top of the stairs watching me as Co engaged passersby to find out what the matter was. We didn't get a solid answer but thought it had something to do with people (taxi drivers?) losing their jobs (to what?) or citizens losing homes due to some planned demolition (see some photos below).

The city itself is on a mountainous peninsula nosing into the juncture of the Yangtze (Jiang Chang) and the Jialing River, but the larger municipality is one of four municipalities that have equal status with twenty-some provinces in China (the three other municipalities are all on the east coast: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai). So, Chongqing is an up-and-coming inland force, soon to be a "port" because of the bigger ships that will be able to cut their way up deeper channels created as a result of the massive Three Gorges Dam. Plans are afoot to make it a major airline hub, and it's already establishing itself as an economic force to behold.

But it wasn't that many decades ago that people got around primarily by stairs--it is one of few modern cities with its scale of development laid out on such steep terrain. The photos below depict a crummy day and sites that wouldn't make the covers of tourist brochures, and yet there were lots of beautiful little niches in what might look quite dreary below. Old people played mahjong high up on a terraced walkways under trees holding their bird cages. Hidden parks, here, there, all over popped into view only when practically in them.

Before the night lights scene found on a Yangtze cruise website, you'll find over a dozen photos from our walk--so brace yourself for lots of pictures.

Chongqing in January (cold but green)

Co crunches on sugar cane while taking in a traffic scene over the Yangtze (Jiang Chang) below.

The character on the "garage door" marks the place for demolition.

 

We went up lots of stairs.

We went down lots of stairs.

We snaked through places like this on the way up or down.

We heard birds singing from cages hung in branches throughout numerous little pocket parks,
their owners, often elderly, doing taiqi or playing mah jong nearby.

The pagoda is on a little mountain top--and Co is playing peekaboo.

These trees grace stone walls and gardens everywhere.

Chongqing is a city of bridges as well as of mountains, with more to come.

The green waters of the Jialing (not too visible here--
over my left shoulder) merge with the brown Yangtze (Jiang Chang).

Note the stairways and imagine the scene a while back, before the highway was in.
The Yangtze (Jiang Chang) is in the distance and more city and mountains are faintly visible south of the river.

A common scene in the dozens and dozen of public spaces.

Jeifangbei is the People's Liberation Monument in the center of the Jeifangbei CBD.
The clock on the top of the historic monument advertises Rolodex watches.

A building in the CBD has layered red and black "chopsticks."
At the blunt end of each black chopstick is the character for peace.

We did catch this nighttime view of Chongqing from the Nanshan mountains (on the south side of the Yangtze).
I did not take this photo, though; it's from a Yangtze cruise website.