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| Night view of Chongqing skyline from the water |
I expected to see scenes from the historic capital of Beijing or Xi' an, home to the Terracotta warriors, but instead, the video flashed scenes from the mountain metropolis of Chongqing with rooftop plazas sitting atop skyscrapers and drones lighting up the night sky.
Built vertically into the side of a mountain where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers meet, Chongqing (formerly called Chungking like the American noodle company) in Central China, is the world's largest city by population- 32 million.
It also happens to be one of Seattle's sister cities.
Long before concrete high-rises, early inhabitants built wooden stilt houses anchored into the riverbank cliffs to maximize usable space. The sky was the only direction for growth when Chongqing underwent an urbanization wave in the late 1990s. The result is a layered architecture where a ground floor might exit onto a street while its upper floor connects via a footbridge to a different street on top of a hill.
Elevators, escalators and steps link various parts of the city, with a monorail running through the middle floors of an apartment building. Around 2,000 suspension bridges at various heights connect neighborhoods.
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| Lights illuminate bridges and buildings |
With its skyscrapers, robot coffee shops and taxi cabs with built-in Chinese-to-English translators, Chongqing is considered China's “Tomorrow City. Although off the radar for American tourists, it’s becoming an international destination for Asian and European visitors.
We almost missed it, but after finding out about the sister-city connection from former Seattle Port Commissioner Paige Miller, we added it onto our three-week itinerary with plans to dive into its mind-bending architecture, sample its Sichuan-style hot pot, and catch a performance of China's unique "face-changing" opera.
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| The Seattle Chinese Garden |
The city's biggest mark on Seattle and Miller's chief focus is the Seattle Chinese Garden on the South Seattle College campus, designed in the Sichuan style by architects and artisans from Chongqing and Seattle.
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| View of Raffles City from the ground |
Like Seattle, Chongqing is best viewed from the water, from high above on a rooftop plaza or on the ground by simply walking up and down many steps.
We tried all three, starting with our room on the 42nd floor of the Ascott Raffles City hotel inside Raffles City where a 1,000-foot glass-enclosed skybridge connects the top of four "horizontal" skyscrapers, housing three hotels and a shopping mall.
We could look straight down from our room at the lighted bridges, office towers and city streets below, but the best view was from the cocktail lounge at the InterContinental Hotel next door. Window tables are reserved for those spending $150 or more on drinks and food, but anyone is welcome to wander in, and walk across a glass-bottomed floor straight down 820 feet to where the two rivers meet.
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| Water view of The Honya Cave |
Sightseeing boats cruise the rivers every night between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. when lights are switched on the buildings and bridges all over town. The Hongya Cave, above, is an 11-story shopping mall and cultural center built on a cliff, is a reconstruction of a military fortress built on stilts in the 4th century.
At ground level, we explored with Lanny Deng, an English teacher and enthusiastic guide for FreeTour.com, a tip-based web site for locals who like to show travelers parts of the city they love.
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| Our guide explains Hot Pot |
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| Robot coffee kiosk |
Meeting in front of the Apple Store in Jiefangbei, the commercial heart of Chongqing, our group of five walked with her for 2.5 hours, stopping to see a robot serving coffee from a sidewalk kiosk, an ancient Banyon tree and a former underground bomb shelter specializing in hot pot, the national dish where raw ingredients are prepared in a pot of spicy, numbing broth.
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| Banyon tree in the city |
Walking across a ground-level plaza that appeared to be at street level, we made our way to the Kuixing Building where bridges link the square to the building, revealing a 22-story drop to another street below.
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| View to below from a bridge on the Kuixing Tower |
Some streets have escalators, but in the past there were only steps, perhaps the reason we saw very few overweight Chinese in Chongqing. Lanny pointed out a statue devoted to "Bang Bang" men, men who used to use bamboo poles to haul loads up and down on their shoulders.
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| Steps leading from a city neighborhood to waterfront |
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| Cliffside walkway overlooking two rivers and the city below |
Later that afternoon, we walked with Wen Qian (aka Sookie), a GuruWalk.com guide, along the E'ling Cliffside Walkway, an urban walkway suspended above ground on tall, concrete pillars. It produced the best view of one of Chongqing's strangest sites - the Liziba station monorail that cuts through the middle of a 19-story apartment building.
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| Do-it-yourself hot pot dinner |
Hot pot must be tried at least once, even for "no star" people such as us. The best I could communicate was "Bu Ma La," roughly translated to "please avoid anything too numbing (Ma) or spicy (La).
The waitress advised a "split pot," with a mild mushroom broth on one side and a tomato broth on the other. We passed on whatever it was the menu described in English as "crispy duck antlers," and went with bok choy, pork and leek dumplngs, meat balls with fresh coriander, mushrooms, cucumbers and "super mighty watermelon cup" (crab) for a total bill of $27 for two with drinks.
More suited to our palates were six stir-fry dishes we helped prepare one afternoon on the 18th floor of a modern high-rise apartment next to a police station.
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| Zippo and Ling Ling inspect veggies in the market |
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| Whole chickens are filleted on the spot |
Our hosts were a young guide and cook from a travel agency I found on the Internet. They put together a shopping trip to a local market followed by a hands-on lunch in a friend's apartment.
We followed Ling Ling, 33, an accountant and amateur cook, and Zippo Chan, 45, our English-speaking guide, through the market past stalls selling fresh, whole chickens, heads and feet still on; duck eggs; foot-long pieces of fresh ginger and pomelos as big as soccer balls. Then it was into a Yellow Ferrari (what they call Chongqing taxies) , and back to the apartment to cook up a Chongqing stir-fry, six dishes in all including a shrimp sauté, a tomato and egg dish, chicken and potatoes with oyster sauce, zucchini, pork with bell peppers, garlic, and of course, a dash of Sichuan pepper.
Later that evening, we caught a "Heritage Talent Show" performance, not in Chongqing's big new riverfront arts center, but in a century-old theater in Shibati, a revitalized pedestrian district of stone stairways and alleys surrounded by modern high-rises.
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| The restored Shibati neighborhood |
Our $12.50 ticket bought an hour and half's worth of acrobatics, fire breathing, clown antics and Chinese face-changing opera in which the performers switch painted masks in the blink of an eye using hidden silk threads, fans, head turns, or body movements.
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We sat on red chairs at a little table with a couple from Malaysia, sharing a pot of tea and a bowl of sunflower seeds while taking turns with a plastic hand-shaped clapper to applaud the performers.
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| Plastic clappers save wear and tear on real hands |
I can think of many reasons to recommend China's "Tomorrow City," but this was one of the best.
You had me at crispy deer antlers.
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