Chongqing: China’s Real-Life Cyberpunk City

Chongqing feels almost unreal, like stepping into a futuristic video game where trains pass through skyscrapers, highways stack up several stories high, massive bridges span rivers, and neighborhoods rise straight up the mountainsides.

But there’s a reason the city looks this way.

With more than 90% of its land covered by mountains and hills, Chongqing has had to find creative ways to build, move, and live in a city with limited flat land.

From Liziba and the Crown Escalator to the Yangtze River Cableway and underground air-raid shelters, many of Chongqing’s most unusual spaces were shaped by a simple challenge: finding room.

Today, those solutions have become part of what makes Chongqing one of China’s most fascinating cities.

In this video, Xiabing Su explores how Chongqing turned its geography from a constraint into an advantage — and how that transformation created the city’s famous “8D” landscape.