A municipality the size of Austria where a train runs through a building, the world’s largest station opened last June, and the world’s largest satellite terminal the April before it — Chongqing builds at a scale that makes scale itself the attraction.
The numbers stack vertically like the city: a record 760,000-plus inbound international visitors in 2025 (border flows +30%), foreign-currency tourism revenue back to $2.4 billion, and a Three Gorges cruise fleet that beat its pre-pandemic best with 1.2 million passengers. The world arrived via its feeds — Liziba’s train-through-tower, Hongya Cave’s lanterns — and stayed for the hotpot.
The transport stack is pure superlative: Jiangbei airport’s four runways and four terminals (80 million capacity, T3B by Zaha Hadid), Chongqing East’s 1.22-million-m² station (1 hour to Chengdu, 6 to Beijing), a 593-km metro network with the planet’s largest monorail system, and Chaotianmen pier sending 49 cruise ships down the Yangtze.
The studies below track each layer — what opened, who arrives, what they spend, and how the airport, rail, river port and bus systems actually behave in a city built on stairs. Use the menu to move between the seven studies.
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