Chongqing has appeared in Chinese films since the 1940s, but its modern screen identity was fixed in the 2000s, when a generation of directors began using the city as a location for crime stories, comedies and romance. The reasons are obvious once you walk around: the terrain is dramatic, the city is built up the sides of two rivers, the monorail and the cable car and the escalators are visually unlike anything else in China, and the fog and rain that hang over the basin for much of the winter give every exterior a grey, filmic quality.
What the films use
The most celebrated single image is a monorail station built into the middle of a residential building, where the train passes through the block rather than around it; it appears in films and in every list of the city's oddities. Beyond that, directors return to the stepped alleys and the old lanes on the ridges, the steep stairways and the funicular lifts, the cable car over the Yangtze, the noodle shops and hotpot restaurants, and the layers of road and rail stacked on top of each other. The city is also used for its weather: night shots in rain with neon reflected in the wet streets are almost a Chongqing genre in themselves.
Walking the locations
You can build a very good day out of the places that appear on screen, and you do not need to be a film enthusiast to enjoy it. The route runs through the older districts on the peninsulas and hills - the alleyways around the traditional teahouses, the old streets near the rivers, the ridge roads with their viewpoints, and the transport oddities that connect them. Because the city is genuinely vertical, the walking is up and down stairways and through buildings, and the best approach is to pick two or three areas rather than trying to cross the whole city on foot.
Practical notes
Chongqing's streets are hard to navigate from a map because they are stacked in three dimensions; use the metro to move between districts and expect to walk and climb a great deal within them. Summer is extremely hot and humid and the walking is punishing; autumn and spring are much better. Most of the locations are ordinary public streets and buildings rather than attractions, so there is nothing to book. If you want the night skyline views that appear in the films, the riverside promenades and the bridges give them for free.
