I tread the five longest escalators I’ve ever descended on my way from the metro’s entrance to its far-off platform. But after a mere minute in the monorail, the carriage breaks out of the cliffside into the muted sunlight of Chongqing’s misty cityscape. We move along the slightly undulating course of the Jialing River, thirty metres above the water’s surface. A forest of skyscrapers covers the far bank, connected to downtown by one bridge after the other. The metro stops at each, to give an opportunity to cross, before boring back into the mountain that bears the heart of the city.

Again a long set of escalators, and I appear on a busy square, robbed of the sun’s rays by a group of towering shapes. The mirrored glass bounces light between their slender curves, supported by swarms of equally oversized publicity screens on the lower levels. I do not know where to walk, and simply let myself be carried along by the buzz of Chongqing.

At the joining of the Jialing and the Yangtze, I find myself lost in a city of more dimensions than it should allow. Steep cliffs and tall slopes combine to make deeply buried stations spit out monorails. They hover far above the ground, while necessitating bridges hundreds of metres long, just to connect one neighbourhood to the next. For a while, I decide to simply rely on my own two legs.

I round the corner of another street bereft of sunlight by the concrete jungle, and find myself on a large square. I walk between the other pedestrians, perhaps not alone in my search for open air and solid ground. I crane my neck but discover it is not ‘up’ I should be looking. Instead, at the edge of the square, beyond its balustrade, I peer down thirty storeys towards street level, discovering that my square lies atop another dizzying housing complex.

This city’s insanity fires me on, and I cannot but keep moving. I cross its rivers by cable car to get a new perspective, return through the cores of its steel-and-cable bridges, ascend high viewpoints in an attempt to fit it within my field of view, but of course miserably fail to do so. Perhaps only at the confluence of its two mighty rivers, a point where Chongqing envelops me with all its lights, shapes, and quirky beauty, do I finally get a grip on its boundless power. 

This grip I quickly lose when a street vendor tries to sell me one of his many deep fried duck heads. A second blow follows instantly, when his neighbour points to his platter of similarly fried rabbit heads, red with spice.