Why it looks like this

The old city sits on a hilly peninsula between two great rivers, the Yangtze and the Jialing. There was never enough flat land, so the city grew vertically: roads run on different levels, buildings have street entrances on multiple floors, and a metro line famously passes through the middle of an apartment block.

Bridges are Chongqing's streets across the water — the municipality has built them by the dozen — and cable cars and elevators count as public transport. In 1997 Chongqing was carved out of Sichuan as China's newest direct-administered city, setting off a building boom on both banks.