Hongyadong Route

What Hongyadong is

Hongyadong is a vast complex in the diaojiaolou (stilt-house) style, built on the cliff just before the Jialing pours into the Yangtze. Diaojiaolou is the traditional mountain-and-water way of building — posts driven into a slope or waterside with the floor cantilevered out. Hongyadong renders that style in a modern shopping complex, eleven storeys stacked along the cliff, the upper floors meeting the city street and the lower ones the river. At night the whole building is lit gold, and people gather for its reflection on the water — Chongqing's foremost night view. Inside, souvenir shops and canteens fill floor by floor, and you can watch the view while eating skewers and snacks. It is the clearest example of Chongqing's "three-dimensional city," and you graze it riding the lifts up and down.

A Chongqing night — skewers and jianghu pots

Chongqing's food comes into its own at night. From the evening, as the day's heat eases, the "pots" gathered round a table burner — chuanchuan, grilled fish, chicken pot, jianghu dishes — light up the streets. Chuanchuan is hotpot ingredients threaded onto sticks: you pick your own, cook them in the red pot, and pay by the sticks you finish — an ease that works alone or in a crowd. Mala grilled fish, a river fish grilled then simmered in hot broth, is a dish only a riverside city has. All of them run on "share it, add and cook on, sit long," the Chongqing way — sweating through heat and numbness, cooling your mouth with beer or liangxia. That back-and-forth is the evening meal. Sweet ciba and cold noodles are the small rests tucked between.

How to walk this route

Start at Linjiangmen on Rail Transit Lines 1 and 2. Arrive in the evening and, while it is still light, take in Hongyadong's facade and the riverside, ready for the night view once it darkens. Eating begins in earnest after sundown. Start light with chuanchuan; grilled fish and chicken pot take time to grill and simmer, so order them soon after you sit. When the heat mounts, cool down with liangxia or brown-sugar ciba, and close clean with cold noodles. You can eat inside the complex, but the surrounding lanes hold more local-facing shops where you can sit in peace. The view is at its best about an hour after sunset, and can be shot from the Qiansimen Bridge or the far bank, so split the eating and the viewing across the evening to keep it unhurried. It gets crowded — mind your valuables.