Monorails and Mountains: Navigating Chongqing’s 3D Transit Web

In Chongqing, the ground is an illusion. You can enter a building’s lobby, ride the elevator up to the twelfth floor, step outside, and find yourself standing on a busy asphalt street crowded with yellow taxis, street food carts, and honking delivery scooters. The city, built on steep sandstone ridges along the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, has forced architects and urban planners to throw out the traditional flat map and build a three-dimensional transportation network.

Nowhere is this vertical imagination clearer than at Liziba Station (李子坝站, Lǐzǐbà Zhàn). Located in the Yuzhong District (渝中区, Yúzhōng Qū), the station is perched on a steep hillside overlooking the green waters of the Jialing River (嘉陵江, Jiālíng Jiāng).

If you stand on the concrete viewing platform at road level, you will see a nineteen-story residential apartment building. Every few minutes, a long, snake-like train on Monorail Line 2 (单轨2号线, Dānguǐ Èrhào Xiàn) rounds a curve on a raised concrete track, glides along the hillside, and disappears directly into a rectangular opening on the eighth floor of the building.

The station has become a magnet for travelers clutching smartphones, all pointing their cameras upward to capture the moment the train seems to be swallowed by the apartment block. But the real story is in the engineering behind this vertical puzzle.

In the late 1990s, when the city was planning the monorail line and a private developer was planning the residential tower, the two projects occupied the exact same space. Instead of routing the track around the steep cliff—an expensive and difficult task—or clearing the residential plans, engineers and architects worked together to design a single, integrated structure.

Although they appear to be one, the station and the apartment building are structural twins that do not touch. The monorail track sits on six massive concrete pillars that rise from the valley floor, completely independent of the apartment tower. The residential building is built around these pillars, leaving a thin, rubber-insulated air gap between the train tunnels and the apartment walls.

Because of this gap, residents living in the apartments above and below the station do not feel their floors shake. Furthermore, instead of traditional steel wheels on steel tracks, the trains of Line 2 run on solid rubber tires. The sound of the train entering the building is not a loud metallic screech, but a soft, rubbery whistle that is quieter than the hum of a standard household dishwasher.

Inside the station, the vertical nature of Chongqing becomes even more real. If you buy a ticket and enter the platform, you are on the eighth floor. From the station lobby, you can look down through the windows at the Jialing River far below. To leave, you can descend the stairs to the first floor to reach the riverside road. Alternatively, you can walk out the back exit of the station, cross a short pedestrian bridge, and find yourself walking directly onto a steep mountain road that leads up into the old residential neighborhoods of the Yuzhong ridge.

Liziba is not an isolated design quirk. It is the logic of the entire city. Throughout Chongqing, pedestrian bridges connect the twenty-third floors of different high-rises, public escalators serve as municipal transit links up steep cliffs, and roads run along the roofs of multi-story parking garages. It is a city where transport does not run around the architecture—it runs straight through it, proving that in a mountain metropolis, the shortest distance between two points is often a straight line through someone’s living room.

Practical Beats

• Admission: Standing on the ground-level viewing platform to take photos is completely free. To ride the monorail or enter the platforms, a standard metro fare applies (starting at 2 RMB).
• Getting There: Take Chongqing Metro Line 2 directly to Liziba Station (李子坝站). To photograph the train entering the building, follow the signs inside the station to descend to the ground level and exit onto the riverside road. The viewing platform is directly across the street from the building.
• Photography Tips: Trains run frequently, about every 3 to 5 minutes during peak hours. The best shot is from the middle of the viewing platform looking up at a 45-degree angle. Use a wide-angle lens to capture both the Jialing River in the foreground and the full height of the building.
• Transit Tips: For the best views of the river and the city's cliffside tracks, try to board the first carriage of Line 2. The front window offers a driver-like view as the train curves along the edge of the mountains, hovering high above the riverfront roads.