Chongqing Is a Multilevel Maze—Good Luck Finding Your Way Around

Jackson Lu’s apartment building doesn’t have an elevator, so when he leaves his home, the photographer has to walk downstairs from the 18th level. Luckily, it doesn’t take too long, because the ground floor is on the 12th story. This is life in Chongqing, China, where the urban planning decisions can sound more like a riddle than a city that actually exists. “People can’t wrap their heads around the directions, space, and the ground floor,” Lu says of those visiting or learning about the city for the first time.

Recently, he posted a video on TikTok showcasing an average commute in the metropolis, which quickly went viral and has since been seen more than 30 million times. In it, he addresses the oddities of his apartment complex, before going to the train station that “feels like a nuclear fallout shelter.” On the subway, he winds around the city on an elevated monorail before the train takes him through the middle of a residential building. “Finally I get off at the city square. Solid ground at last, right?” he narrates in the video. “Nope, I’m actually on the 22nd floor of my office building.” On his commute home, he opted for the bus, which navigates a labyrinth of highways in the sky, at one point driving 20 stories above the ground, according to Lu.

Built atop a mountain and densely populated, Chongqing is known for it’s unique urban design. The metropolis is located at the intersection of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers in southwest-central China. “The city served as the wartime capital during World War II…after, the population got denser, and we needed to urbanize,” Lu says. But its topography requires specific design decisions. “We utilize vertical space just like Hong Kong,” he adds. This includes things like the vast outdoor plazas Lu showed in his video, which can appear like the ground floor but are actually many feet above sea level. “In Chongqing, we never really know what floor we’re on,” Lu said at the start of a different TikTok, which has been viewed more than 14 million times.