Chongqing Hotpot and Mountain City Nightscape

The first impression upon arriving in Chongqing is: this city rejects flatness. Navigation basically fails here — you think your destination is fifty meters ahead, but it turns out to be fifty meters above your head.

For dinner, I headed straight to Peijie Old Hotpot. Arriving at 7 PM, the entrance was already packed with people waiting, and the air was thick with the aroma of beef tallow and Sichuan peppercorns — just the smell was enough to make my mouth water. After a forty-minute wait, I was finally seated. When the pot was brought to the table, I was stunned — a full pot of red oil, topped with a thick layer of dried chilies and Sichuan peppercorns. My first dip was tripe, the classic "seven up, eight down" for fifteen seconds, dipped in sesame oil and garlic sauce. It went into my mouth crisp and tender, the numbing-spicy flavor exploding from the tip of my tongue, and sweat immediately beaded on my forehead. I later ordered duck intestine, threadfin fish, and mountain jelly vegetable, and couldn't put down my chopsticks even when my lips went numb.

It was almost nine by the time I left the hotpot restaurant. I walked from Jiaochangkou toward the Yangtze River Cableway and bought a one-way ticket. As the cable car swayed gently forward, the mighty Yangtze River flowed beneath my feet, and the lights on both banks connected into two golden ribbons in the night. A brief four minutes, like crossing from the left side of a city to its right.

After getting off the cableway, I headed straight to Hongyadong. From a distance, seeing the stilted buildings clinging to the hillside, I was genuinely awestruck — eleven stories of wooden structures layered along the cliff, dyed into a floating golden palace by the warm yellow lights. Once inside, it felt more like a three-dimensional maze, with different shops and food stalls on every floor. I squeezed my way to the front of the observation deck. Below my feet was the Jialing River, across the river were the skyscrapers of Jiangbeizui, and the cable stays of Qiansimen Bridge shimmered silver in the night.

Chongqing's nightscape possesses an unreasonable kind of grandeur. It's not refined and orderly like Shanghai's Bund; it's more like cranking every light to maximum brightness and hurling them all at your face. This brutal beauty, much like its hotpot — you know you can't handle it, but you just can't stop.