In another thread, we came to the conclusion that China’s Chongqing was the biggest city very few westerners know about.
How true is this? Do you know anything about Chongqing? What do you think other people know about it.
<<I know I sound a bit like a spambot from the Chongqing tourism board>>
I can’t say I know anything about it. Except that it has one hell of an ominous looking photo on Wikipedia. I think I’ll schedule my vacation for elsewhere.
But it’s only the biggest because it’s nearly 32,000 sq miles. This is bigger than Taiwan and just a bit smaller than Ireland.
Most people in the West know it as Chungking, and it probably is better known to older people as it was China’s war time capital.
I know it is called the Chicago of China.
It looks like it has a fair amount of new high rise construction. Does it have the same problem as some of the ‘investment cities’ where buildings are owned, but nobody lives in the units so they do not depreciate?
I am not so sure I would go there as a tourist destination other than passing through on my way to somewhere of more historical interest, unless I was combining business trip there with a few days elsewhere as snuck in vacation.
Given that mainland China was essentially closed off to visitors for years, it’s not that surprising that people don’t know about a town that isn’t exactly touristy and has changed the spelling of its name.
Looks like Neo-Tokyo from Otomo’s Akira.
My fellow americans are woeful on almost any question of world geography. Ask random people on a street to name ANOTHER french city than Paris and see what you get.
I’m not familiar with that particular city at all. I am, however, aware of the fact that China contains several very large cities with which I am completely unfamiliar, for what that’s worth.
I’m guessing that there’s a good number of Americans who pronounce the name “Chong-kwing.”
I wouldn’t blame anybody in the west for not knowing about Chongqing.
Example: I have travelled extensively in China. A few years ago I went to the city of Leshan. I had never even heard of Leshan until I got there - I was just visiting the huge Buddha carved out of a cliff nearby. Leshan’s population > 1,000,000. China’s bloody massive.
(I personally know of Chongqing because I lived in Hong Kong - my first knowledge of the city was the infamous Chungking Mansions, and the movie Chungking Express. But then my experience is not average.)
I lived pretty much down the street from Chongqing and visited pretty often. Nearby Chengdu, which is pretty much equally huge and equally obscure, gets most of the tourist traffic (and it is a genuinely nice place, with a lot to offer foreign visitors.) Chongqing is a classic industrial city, without a ton to offer beyond some exceptionally good food.
The exception is Christmas. On Christmas eve in Chongqing, the most bizarre thing I have ever seen happens. Thousands and thousands of young people pour into the downtown shopping district. It is literally seas of people for miles. Then, they all don light up devil horns or santa hats, and spend the night pummeling each other with giant inflatable baseball bats. It is the most utterly surreal and incomprehensible thing I have ever been a part of.
We also came to the conclusion that Chongqing is the major city in the world with the lowest ration of foreign restaurants. THere are literally five or six ethnic restaurants, a smatter of high end hotel restaurants and western steakhouses, and the usual fast food. And that is it. There is probably one non-fast food foreign restaurant per million people. That said, Chongqing has some GREAT food- I remember an all-you-can-eat Peking duck restaurant, the wonderfuly garlic-and-cumin Uigher naan, and the requisite super ultra spicy hot pot.
Chongqing really does look like a Bladerunner dystopian future. From the ground, the high rises are an endless forest, and the smog is exceptionally thick, even for China, lending the place a short of shadowy menacing mystery. At night, there is neon everywhere, and the hills play tricks with perspective. It’s a really bizarre, strange feeling place. It might be worth stopping by just for that.
A friend of mine flies 747 freighters between China & the US. His standard line is “I’m off to yet another city of 10 million you’ve never heard of.” He’s usually right in that, even though as a pilot I’m more attuned to geography than most.
I also think that when the latinized spellings changed (Peking -> Beijing), that destroyed a lot of Americans’ knowledge of Chinese cities. As an example, I know a bit about Chongqing. But I didn’t know it was the same place as the old Chungking which I also knew a bit about. A little thought makes it plausible they’d be the same place, but I’d never tried to match the new spelling to any older names I knew.
IIRC, there used to be a brand of cheap supermarket Chinese food in the US called Chung King.
Judging from the satellite image, the actual city doesn’t seem to be that big, physically. Less than 10 miles across, when really big cities are 30 miles or more. Population density could be very high in Chongqing, I guess, but most of the claimed 29 million population must live in that vast 32,000 square miles of hinterland,
Check out this photo essay.
Chonqing is CRAZY dense. It’s not like Manhattan, where you have some clusters of skyscrapers surrounded by less dense residential areas with walk-up apartments and even rowhouses. That’d be unimaginable in Chongqing. It’s all massive skyscrapers, for miles and miles and miles, as far as they eye can see in every direction. This could easily be a US city skyline in its own right. In Chongqing, a sight like that is just an ordinary view of an unfashionable outskirt, the sort of thing that is repeated a thousand times over wherever you look…something you drive through for a solid half-hour while you make your way into the city. It’s dense to the point where your mind struggles to make visual sense of what it is seeing. Where we would expect suburbs or outskirts, Chongqing has full-on city skyscrapers.
That said, China counts population on the municipality level, and the Chongqing municipality includes a number of satellite cities. It can be thought of as a “metropolitan area” akin to the New York metro or the San Francisco Bay area. The biggest difference would be that in the US, our urban sprawl tends to be held together by suburbs. In China, it’s dense tracts of tiny farms (which can approach the density of US suburbs, despite being technically rural) that fill the spaces of urban sprawl.
Bangkok is like that. For some reason it freaks me out.
Well the fact that I thought you were talking about a Chinese actor or politician from the thread title pretty much answers your question XD I actually tried to think of another Chinese city besides Beijing and came up blank…which is really really sad.
Prior to this thread, I was aware of its existence, but knew nothing else about it.
I met a guy at Disney World whose nametag said he was from Chongqing. He taught me how to pronounce it correctly.
Reminds me of some of my Sim City 2000 creations when I was going for max pop without Argos, all high density.
How are you supposed to pronounce it? Chong-King?
