FOR TWO YEARS, I WAS IN LOVE WITH A picture of Chongqing. You’ve probably seen it on your social media feed, too. A light-rail train plunging perpendicularly into the 19th floor of an apartment block like a magician’s saw. A canyon of towers lit up like a Blade Runner outtake. A plaza where you’re casually walking in at street level, only to discover you’re still somehow thirty storeys in the sky. I watched those fifteen seconds on a loop for two years. I wanted that fever dream of a city the way you crush on a stranger across a room.
Then I went to Chongqing.
On a hot, humid night in early June, I rolled out of Chongqingbei Station, totally wrung out. Doing the thing I always do—arriving at the end of the day on purpose. Unlike some who love to land in a new city at the break of dawn, I love arriving blind, when I can throw open the curtains the next morning and meet it undefeated by jet lag.
So, it was already dark when the DiDi driver dropped me at the SEYA Panoramic across from the Ascott Raffles. And the second I stepped out, before I’d clapped eyes on a single thing worth photographing, there it was.
The smell.
In the hot, wet June air, a strong pang of Sichuan came over me. I turned eagerly and discovered a hawker turning unidentifiable meat over coals and dusting it with peppercorn, making the whole street smell. It felt like I had already tasted the city.
But before any of that happened, I had to earn it.
I used to think Schengen had a personal vendetta against me. Sweet summer child, come to China. Not that China hates you—it simply refuses to acknowledge the internet you live on. Google? Gone. Instagram, WhatsApp, the maps app you’ve trusted your whole adult life? Vanished at the border. You rebuild your phone from scratch like a refugee of the App Store. AMap so you can find a street, Dianping so you can find dinner, Alipay because your credit cards are useless until you bind them to it, DiDi to summon a cab, Trip.com (genuinely the hero of my story) to hold the whole thing together and a VPN humming in the background. Carry your passport everywhere. Charge everything. Going to China is like going to war, and I mean that with love: it is not for the weak and it is gloriously worth it.
That first night I poured myself a glass of wine in my loft on the 52nd floor—Chinese hospitality had handed me a view most cities would charge a kidney for at the price of a decent dinner back home. I sank into the couch to watch the skyline dance. Floor twelve could be ground floor here, cliffside elevators running for 30-odd stories is a common sight, as are motorways suspended hundreds of feet in the air—not for nothing do they call this the multi-level multiverse of madness.
Dinner on night one had to be hotpot. We found a local place where no one spoke a word of English. The owner asked, via the universal grammar of raised eyebrows, whether we could handle spicy. We nodded, two reckless idiots, and he set a cauldron of mala broth in front of us, slick and red and freckled with peppercorn, angling an electric fan at our faces like a man who has watched many foreigners suffer and wishes them a dignified death.
I am Indian. I arrived with a cockiness about chilli that lasted roughly ten minutes, after which I sweated straight through a packet of napkins. But here’s what the clips can never transmit: mala isn’t exactly heat. It’s the peppercorn, which doesn’t burn so much as unplug you—a low electric buzz that climbs the tongue and switches it clean off. It’s unhinged, both tangy and spicy at once, and you just cannot stop eating it. Every few minutes I’d stick my dead tongue out at my partner to prove how numb it was, as if he, equally paralysed, could do anything about it. We laughed until it hurt.
The next morning, my stomach wasn’t in that kind of a cheerful mood, though. At that point, Chongqing had conveyed to me that it isn’t what it seems to be. I was about to discover further proof of that fact when I went looking for the stuff everybody comes here for.
Because the stuff everybody comes here for is the worst of Chongqing. Take the Kuixing Tower—the legendary trick where you stroll in at ground level and find, peering over the edge, that you’re 22 floors upstairs. For about four majestic seconds, it is exactly as clever as advertised. Then you clock the tour groups jostling for identical photos and the hawkers flogging overpriced tat.
Likewise, Hongyadong, the honeycomb of golden stilted lanterns every vlogger climaxes at, was worse: breathtaking for one second, a scrum for all the rest—every phone aloft, nobody yielding an inch, because personal space, I learned, is a Western superstition the Chinese never accepted. I’d come all this way to stand inside my own screensaver, and the screensaver, it turned out, had peaked at fifteen seconds. The picture I’d loved for two years was the one thing in Chongqing that let me down.
Instead, everything I’d never seen coming is what got me. The margins. The unphotographable stuff. Chongqing, it turns out, is a city of small, unposted absurdities and those are most of the fun. For starters, the Beijing bikini (the local male custom of hiking your shirt up over your belly in the heat) was everywhere. Called bang yé in Mandarin, the word literally stands for “exposing yourself like a grandfather”. It is apparently good for circulating warm qi around the organs and, I’m told, especially pleasant after a bowl of mala.
In June, the city is a parade of bare male stomachs, most with a cigarette attached. Because, god, the smoking! The whole city smokes, joyfully, indoors, on platforms, in the rain. One morning, I watched a man squat under an umbrella in a downpour and smoke with the serenity of a monk who’d achieved a level of nonchalance I never will. I swear there was an ashtray beside the massage bed at the spa.
This incoherence was, I concluded, what I was hooked on the most. Nearly 32 million people living on near-vertical hills where the rivers Jialing and Yangtze meet, a municipality the size of Austria and somehow the roads gleam and the trains run. The whole impossible Jenga tower of a place works.
Meanwhile, the nights finished me off. The world will lecture you endlessly about nightlife in this capital or that, and somehow China—which throws one of the great parties on earth—gets none of the credit. Ziwei Lu, a single strip the locals call ‘Little Bangkok’, is flooded with some of the best bars and speakeasies in the city. The whole area is lined with basement wine windows, glass-fronted bistros. You’ll find some smashing cocktails here.
It was here, over dice, that I brought the last of my dumb assumptions to quietly die. That the Chinese are cold and closed. Instead, what I found were people openly delighted by two stray Indians who’d washed up in their city—not Shanghai, not Beijing, but here. They were excited to know more about us, patient enough to teach us Liar’s Dice, round after round, the language barrier being no match for a good bluff and our full glasses. Fair warning: the Chinese can really hold their liquor.
It was one of them who sent us to a spa named Golden Impression—and that recommendation rearranged my understanding of what a spa can be. You don’t get a table and a polite shove out the door. Instead, it was a private room with two recliners that folded flat into massage beds, a sofa, a stocked-up mini fridge, a projector and a bathroom in full Dyson. Then, our very own butler came in with a food menu from which we could order unlimited food. We ordered dumplings, dan dan noodles and iced lemon teas. As it was wheeled in, we put on a film and only after an hour of that did we ring for the actual massage. We eventually left at 3am, having spent six hours there for eighty dollars a head. I have paid more for worse on every other continent.
At one point, Chongqing used to be a wartime capital, and the city was bombed relentlessly. Through the days, beyond the tourist gimmicky attractions, I finally began to understand the place despite its Instagram glory. What I understood was that Chongqing refused to tear down its past to make room for its future. It just builds on top. You can stand on the glass deck of a mega-mall and look straight down and there’s a wet market, or a 1970s concrete block with laundry strung from rust-streaked balconies, still completely, stubbornly alive beneath your feet. Era stacked on era, the shiny straddling the old without a flicker of apology.
The verticality the reels sell as a gimmick is nothing of the kind—it’s survival, the only grammar available to a city wedged between mountains and two rivers with nowhere to grow but up and in.
Chongqing is welded into my being now, much like its own maddening, layer-upon-layer infrastructure, also because on my second night there, with all the neon glittering below us, my partner asked me to marry him. As I said yes, I realised I had brought my own sense of fascination, love for weird and wacky things, my life and future life partner, and stacked all of it one neat layer on top of its magnificent multiplanarity.
On my last morning, I threw the curtain open one final time—the city earns a daylight goodbye, too—and went down into the heat to leave the way I’d come in. The air was waiting at the door: peppercorn, smoke, river, that thick June wet. My nose, out of muscle memory, braced for numbness that wasn’t coming. I’d arrived in this city by smell, knowing nothing, in love with a picture. I left by smell, knowing better, in love with the real thing. The reels had promised me a train through a building. The city, bless it, gave me everything the train never thought to mention.
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