Chongqing plays itself: filming locations you can still walk through for free

Most cities that appear constantly on screen are pretending to be somewhere else. Chongqing is filmed as itself: a city stacked above two rivers, where a street can run level with the sixth floor of the building beside it, and a crew gets its vertical shot without renting a crane.

The station inside an apartment block

At Liziba (李子坝, Lǐzibà) on Metro Line 2, the monorail enters a residential tower a few floors up and leaves through the far wall. The trains are rubber-tyred, so from the plaza below the sound is closer to a passing bus than a railway. The viewing deck under the track is free, a train comes every few minutes, and the queue that forms there is for the photograph rather than the ride.

Stairs that count as streets

Above Cangbai Road, the lift at Kuixinglou (魁星楼, Kuíxīnglóu) climbs twenty-two floors and opens onto a street door instead of a roof. There is no ticket and no platform. It is ordinary municipal circulation that happens to look like an effect shot.

Hongyadong (洪崖洞, Hóngyádòng) does the same thing at scale: stilt-style levels linking the upper road to the river road, free to enter, busiest in the hour after the lights come on. Treated as a staircase with a view rather than a destination, it stops being a queue.

Nothing here was built for a camera, which is why nothing here is convenient.

What was rebuilt, and what still runs

Shibati (十八梯, Shíbātī), the long stair between the upper city and the Yangtze, reopened in 2021 as new construction following the old line. It photographs cleanly and reads as a set, because in the sense that matters it is one. The Yangtze River Cableway (长江索道, Chángjiāng Suǒdào) still crosses the water on a 1980s alignment, now priced and queued as sightseeing rather than transport. Go on a weekday morning, before the line doubles back on itself.

在重庆，地图上的同一条路，可能相差好几层楼。