That’s a bullshit question as the next largest city in France after Paris is Marseille at ~750,000 people. Fifteen US cities are bigger than that including San Antonio, San Jose, Austin, and Columbus. Find me a Frenchman who knows anything about Columbus, Ohio and I’ll find you five Americans that have heard of Marseilles or Nice or Bordeaux.
OK, so I am not a very well-traveled person, but shockingly I have actually been to Chongqing. We took a train there from Beijing because we were taking a Yangtze River cruise that left from there. My memories are a little fuzzy because I was pretty sick at the time (food poisoning) but I principally remember it being industrial and pretty dirty. We were only there for one night and stayed in the hotel to eat because I wasn’t well enough to go walking around a lot in the heat. They had really good dumplings. We got on the cruise boat the next morning and that’s all I saw of Chongqing.
On another note, having food poisoning on an overnight train really sucks. I got sick in Beijing, then spent most of the 25-hour trip in my bunk, interspersed with trips to the “toilet,” which was a hole in the floor of the car where you could see the tracks whizzing by underneath you as you crapped directly on them. We were in first class, too.
Well, if you call it Chungking then a lot more people have heard of it.
Chongqing is one of my least favorite cities in China. Let me re-phrase that - it’s a shithole. It is at the confluence of some major Yangzi River tributaries and home to heavy industry. Think oil refineries, steel, automotive and now PC manufacturing. It’s really hilly, the weather sucks about 99% of the time, heavy pollution, lots of smog, etc. It is one of the “3 furnances” of China along with Wuhan and Nanjing (eg, it’s horribly hot in the summer and the factories all have a “hot weather vacation” and shut down for a few weeks. It was a shithole in the 1980’s with old pre-revolutionary buildings when I spent about 2 weeks there on several different trips when researching the guidebook. It’s a shithole now with urban reform in the past 10 years. I’ve been to the Ford factory multiple times.
The people are nice enough, though.
Chongqing government is extremely corrupt - even by Chinese standards. It was made a “provincial level” municipality that reports directly into Beijing maybe 20 years ago. In other words, it is considered a “province” like the other municipalities of Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. The arguement was that the Sichuan Province and the capital Chengdu overshadowed Chongqing, and by making it a province, then Chongqing could modernize. Brings to mind lipstick on a pig.
On the other hand, I really like Chengdu (for a big Chinese city).
(I’m really not trying to be offensive regarding Chongqing but I truely have never liked the place in the 3 decades I’ve been going there.)
Upon reading the thread title, my first thought was “Chongqing who?” >.>
♪♫ CHUNG KING! CHUNG KING! Try Chung King for a beautiful body! ♪♫
♪♫ CHUNG KING! CHUNG KING! Try Chung King for a beautiful taste! ♪♫
Yeah, I’m a child of the 1970s.
One of our hypothetical questions in Peace Corps was “for what amount of money would you be willing to spend the rest of your life in Chongqing?” We never once had a taker, even one we got up to enough money to create a private artificial biosphere to host your friends in your non-stop party.
One of the funnier things I saw in my life was when a family friend from beautiful, modern Hong Kong came to visit his in-laws in Chongqing. They were trying really hard to sell him on moving there, showing him the “spectacular views” (glimpses of rotting bare concrete tenements through the endless grey smog-drizzle) from their tacky apartment(complete with two-story chandelier and slimy indoor fish pond), the delicious local food (prepared on the sidewalk in dubious conditions, too spicy to eat) and the exciting nightlife (sleazy karoake, weak beer from street stalls.) He was amazing polite through the whole thing, while we were both cracking up in secret. I’m sure the in laws couldn’t ever imagine how polite, clean and organized Hong Kong is.
You guys are making nostalgic, though, for a weekend in the Chonx. Despite being such a good argument for humans being a cancer on the earth, it can be a really fun little city with the right people.
I had never heard of it and I consider myself to be knowledgeable about geography and other cultures.
Wow. I may not want to live there, but now I really, really want William Gibson to place a couple-few novels there.
I have heard of Chung King, but guess with the new spelling, would never have guessed this was the same city. (Then again, I also missed the memo when they changed the name of Bombay and other cities in India.)
This city oddly fascinates me from the photos. There is something both scary and exciting about Chongqing. I am absolutely sure it is a crap hole, but the overwhelmingness of the scope of those buildings, and the claustrophobic streets between the buildings, would make it a freakish, nightmarish experience that would trigger all of my senses.
I most certainly would not want to actually live there, but I would like to stay long enough to feel like a nameless gray character in an Orwellian landscape.
Yeah, I’m kinda weird that way.
I’m in the ‘never heard of it’ camp, I’m afraid.
This shot is great:
A display of the city at Chongqing’s Urban Planning Exhibition hall erected only two years ago is already hopelessly out of date.
Chongqing (Chunking) was also arguably the most bombed city in WW2 depending on definition. Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese government fled to Chongqing after the Rape of Nanking in 1937. The Japanese were too stretched to successfully follow by land but they bombed the everlasting shit out of the city. Not sure if the bomb shelters are still around but I went into some in around 1985 and 86.
Google translate has a sound files.
It’s approximately like “Chong-ching”, with the first “Ch” being a bit subtle, and the “o” pronounced, in the words of Wikipedia, “with the vowel sound in book and ends with the velar nasal sound in sing; as u + eng in zero initial.”
The first syllable is in a rising tone- as if you are asking a question. The second syllable is in a falling tone, which is about the same as the tone you’d use when scolding someone with “no!” That said, in Chongqing itself they will use different tones, as the local dialect changes the tones quite a bit.
FWIW, Chungking/Chongqing is not a Bombay to Mumbai style name change. It’s the same name as it has always been, and the Chinese has not changed at all. The only thing that has changed is that it is transliterated using the Pinyin system rather than older, defunct Wade-Giles system.
Wade-Giles was a pretty cumbersome system, which represented Chinese sounds that don’t exist in English using lots of awkward punctuation marks and uncomfortable consent pairings. Pinyin is not entirely intuitive, as it has it’s own system for representing Chinese sounds that doesn’t correspond exactly to English (how could it?) but it only takes one or two hours of practice to be able to understand Pinyin and pretty much always pronounce Chinese words correctly. You have to learn it, but once you learn it, it is internally consistant.
Pinyin has been the standard system of alliteration since the 1950s in mainland China. Western publications, out of spite for “red China” pointedly used the Wade Giles system (which Taiwan held on to) until the 1980s, when relations normalized. So you are not so much the victim of the changing whims of time, but rather to a political battle over language that we were on the losing side of.
I don’t know. I have never chongqed. 
So if it’s pronounced like “Chong-ching”, then how come Pinyin didn’t transliterate it as “Chongching”?
I’d heard of it, but I don’t know anything at all about it.
Because they’re different consonants albeit ones that western ears and mouths can’t really distinguish between without a lot of practice:
ch as in chin, but with the tongue curled upwards; very similar to nurture in American English, but strongly aspirated.
q No equivalent in English. Like cheek, with the lips spread wide with ee. Curl the tip of the tongue downwards to stick it at the back of the teeth and strongly aspirate.
qing equivalent in American English is like Wayne’s World cha-ching “ching” sound
Basically the Houston of China then. Not to pick on Houston. I like Houston just because I like a lot of people from there. It is a huge U.S. city with nice people with similar attributes. I can see someone foreign person visiting there and writing about the same thing. Most Americans couldn’t tell you that Houston is the 4th biggest city in the U.S. off of the top of their head.
Most Americans would tell you that New York was the biggest city in the U.S. off the top of their heads.
Chongqing municipality is the biggest in China.
After looking at that photo essay, I take it back. Bangkok has skyscrapers as far as the eye can see but at least there’s distance between the clusters, and space between the skyscrapers. Those Chongqing pictures just scream “we should not be doing this to ourselves”.
Shudder.