I had seen the video, obviously. Train enters apartment building, building does not care. I assumed it was a novelty, a one-off piece of engineering built for the cameras. It is not. It is a stop on Line 2 of the Chongqing metro, used every day by people going to work, and the ticket costs the same as any other ride.

Chongqing is a city built on hills and rivers, and it solves problems in ways that look impossible from the outside. This is just one of them.

What is actually happening at Liziba

The station is Liziba, on Line 2, in the Yuzhong district. The monorail runs straight through the sixth to eighth floors of a residential tower. There is a purpose-built cavity in the building, and the train passes through it with about a metre of clearance on each side.

The residents above and below the station live there normally. People have asked, reasonably, whether it is loud. The answer is that the line uses rubber tyres rather than steel wheels, and the track is fitted with noise reduction. At street level the whole thing is startlingly quiet. I stood under it for ten minutes and mostly heard traffic.

Where to stand for the photo

The viewing platform is directly below the building, at ground level, and it is free. That is where the classic shot comes from: train emerging from the hole, building above it, you standing there with your phone.

Timing matters. Trains run every few minutes during the day, so you will not wait long, but the best light is late afternoon when the sun comes down the street at an angle. Late morning is flat and less interesting. There is also a spot a little further along the road where you can frame the train coming down the elevated curve toward the building, which I think looks better than the front-on view.

It gets crowded at weekends. On a Tuesday morning I had the platform almost to myself.

Riding Line 2 properly

The mistake is to get off at Liziba, take the photo and leave. Line 2 is an elevated line for most of its length and it functions as a sightseeing route, except you pay about 2 CNY instead of the price of a river cruise.

Ride from Jiaochangkou, near the city centre, toward Xinshancun. The section along the Jialing River is the good part. You are up on the elevated track looking down at the water, the bridges, and the dense hillside neighbourhoods stacked on top of each other. It is the most honest view of Chongqing you will get, because it shows you how the city is actually arranged.

What to look for

• The river curves, where the track hugs the bank with the water directly below.
• The bridges. Chongqing has a lot of them, and from the elevated line you can see how many layers of road and rail cross the same valley.
• Rooftop vegetable gardens on the apartment blocks, which are everywhere once you start noticing them.
• The way buildings sit at wildly different levels on the same street, a consequence of building on hillsides.

The rest of the city, briefly

If you are in Chongqing for the monorail you will probably end up doing the other obvious things too, and they are worth the time. Hongya Cave is the illuminated stilt building complex by the river, best seen after dark from the bridge opposite. The Yangtze cable car crosses the river for a few yuan and gives you a view of the whole downtown peninsula.

And then there is the food. Chongqing hotpot is not the same as the hotpot you have had elsewhere. It is numbing rather than merely spicy, heavy on Sichuan peppercorn, and served with a dish of oil rather than broth as the dipping sauce. Order the tripe and the beef. Ask for mild if you need to, though mild here still means something.

Practical notes

The metro runs until around 10:30pm and the fare is distance based, usually between 2 and 7 CNY. You can pay with a transport card or a phone app, and single journey tickets are sold at machines that have an English option.

Chongqing is genuinely hilly. If you are planning to walk between the metro and your hotel, check the elevation on a map first, because what looks like a short distance flat on screen can be a serious staircase in reality. Taxis are cheap and I used them more here than in any other Chinese city.

Worth the detour?

Yes, but go for the line, not the single stop. Half a day on Line 2, a photo at Liziba, hotpot in the evening, and you have had a very good Chongqing day for almost no money at all.

Originally published on 71Asia Tours blog.