Chongqing

The site at the confluence of the Jialing and the Yangtze was the centre of the Ba, a people absorbed by the Qin in the fourth century BC. The city took its present name in 1189, when the Song prince who became Emperor Guangzong marked a double promotion — Chongqing means double celebration. Its position made it the transfer point between the Yangtze gorges downstream and the Sichuan plain upstream, and for centuries it lived on salt, timber, silk and the porters who carried goods up its cliffs.

Chongqing was opened to foreign trade in the late nineteenth century, and steamers began working through the gorges. Its transformation came with war: after the fall of Nanjing in 1937 the Nationalist government retreated first to Wuhan and then, in 1938, to Chongqing, which served as China's wartime capital and was formally declared the second capital in 1940. Japanese aircraft bombed it repeatedly over several years, and the population sheltered in tunnels cut into the sandstone, many of which still open onto the streets as shops and restaurants. Allied missions, including the American general Joseph Stilwell's, were based in the city.

After 1949 Chongqing became an industrial centre for steel, machinery and defence production. In 1997 it was separated from Sichuan as a directly administered municipality, a unit larger than many countries, partly to manage resettlement as the Three Gorges Dam reservoir filled and more than a million people were moved. Since then it has grown at extraordinary speed, building bridges, tunnels, monorails and towers into terrain that had long limited it, and becoming a centre for cars, motorcycles and laptop manufacture.

Chongqing calls itself shancheng, the mountain city, and wucheng, the fog city, and both shape how it feels. Buildings are entered from different levels, staircases substitute for streets, and the skyline is seen through haze more often than not. Until recently goods were carried up the slopes by porters with bamboo poles, known locally as bangbang, who waited for work at the bottom of stairways; they are far fewer now and have become a symbol of the city's older, harder life.

The local character is thought of, in China, as blunt, hot-tempered and generous, and food and heat are held to explain it. Hotpot is not simply a meal but the city's main social form, eaten loudly in large groups, on pavements in summer, and defended as hotter and more honest than the Chengdu version. Local people enjoy the comparison with their neighbour: Chengdu is slow and comfortable, Chongqing fast, steep and forthright.

Wartime memory runs through the city, in preserved residences, air-raid tunnels and museums, and is treated as a matter of pride. Sichuan opera and its face-changing tradition are performed here too, and the rivers still order the year — boats, bridges, the level of the Yangtze in flood, and evenings on the riverfront when the towers on both banks light up.

The municipality contains more than 30 million people, but it covers an area roughly the size of Austria and takes in several separate urban areas along with a large rural population; the continuous city around the confluence, densely packed onto the ridges, holds a good deal less. That distinction matters: Chongqing is regularly called the world's largest city, which is true of the municipality as an administrative unit rather than of the urban area.

Work is industrial and increasingly technical. The municipality makes cars and motorcycles, led by Changan, assembles a large share of the world's laptops, and runs a river port that links inland China to the coast; rail freight also leaves here for Europe. Older state factories have closed or moved, and service industries and tourism have grown quickly.

Everyday life is shaped by slope and heat. People climb, take lifts between streets, ride the metro across bridges, and eat late when the day cools. Air-conditioned shopping centres serve as public space through the worst of summer, and riverside promenades fill in the evening. Persistent issues include summer heat and drought years on the Yangtze, air quality trapped by fog, uneven development between the core and the distant counties, and the pressure of visitor numbers on a few very photogenic streets.

Chongqing's cooking is fiercer and oilier than Chengdu's, built on beef tallow, dried chillies, Sichuan peppercorn and fermented bean paste. Hotpot is the centre of it: a pot of beef tallow, chillies and peppercorn, often divided into compartments, in which tripe, beef, duck intestine, luncheon meat, potato, mushrooms and greens are cooked for seconds at a time and dipped in sesame oil with garlic. Maoxuewang, a bowl of duck blood, tripe and vegetables in the same broth, is its restaurant cousin.

Breakfast is xiaomian, thin wheat noodles dressed with chilli oil, pepper, pickles and peanuts, topped with stewed peas or minced pork and eaten at a low stool on the pavement. Other local dishes are unceremonious and strongly flavoured: laziji, fried chicken buried in dried chillies; grilled fish finished in a spiced broth; and suanlafen, sour-and-hot sweet potato noodles sold from snack stalls.

Sweet and cooling foods balance the heat — bingfen jelly with brown sugar and peanuts, sour plum drink, and iced soya milk. Tea is drunk in old teahouses on the peninsula and in Ciqikou, and local baijiu and cold beer are the usual accompaniment to a hotpot table. Peppercorn and chilli aside, the rivers still supply fish and the surrounding countryside citrus, bamboo shoots and cured pork.