The chances are, you’ve never heard of this place. Nor had I, until fairly recently. No doubt I should have. Chiang Kai-shek turned it into his wartime headquarters, so it gets a mention in the history books. But that’s about it.
Now, though, it’s become the biggest municipality in the world, with a population larger than
Canada or Poland, and it’s oddly attractive. True, most of it has been built since 1997, when it was officially carved out of Sichuan and given its own status. But because it’s hilly, and built on the confluence of two rivers, the Yangsze and the smaller Jialing, it’s managed to keep a certain attraction in spite of the undifferentiated skyscrapers going up everywhere.
Chongqing has a rotten climate — it’s not known as Fog City for nothing — and its temperature goes from freezing to more than 100°F in the space of a few months. Still, with 15 universities and its major hotel, the weird and charming Hongyadong, built in traditional style down a cliffside, Chongqing is unlikely to be boring.
But it has just lost one of its main distinguishing features. By the time you read this, the part of the city I want to celebrate will have vanished without trace. It’s a slummy area known as
the 18 Steps: 18 being what Chinese people say when they mean ‘loads and loads’. The steps led down from the central urban area, with its huge gleaming buildings, its pedestrian plazas, its vast video screens and all
the rest of the identikit layout of a
21st-century city — apart from a few details, you could be anywhere from Daejeon in South Korea to Croydon in Surrey — to the river below.
All down these steps were stalls, teahouses, little restaurants and vendors selling everything from replacement styluses for mobile phones to plastic hair clips. The steps pulsated with a delightful noisy, complex life that hadn’t changed in various important particulars from the days of the Sui dynasty, 1,400 years before.
It was no place for the fastidious. The teahouse at the top swarmed with flies, and there was no need to ask where the loo was, but I’ve seen less concentration in the card room of a London club than I saw at the tables, where small groups were playing a paper version of mah jong. Less enjoyment, too, as the attractive older woman who ran the place wandered round refilling the cups and joshing the regulars.
Close by was a stall selling every imaginable part of a pig. I often take one of the novels from the superb
Aubrey/Maturin set by Patrick O’Brian on my more difficult assignments because they have a humour that lifts the spirit. In them you read a lot about Jack Aubrey’s liking for soused pig’s face. But that was 200 years ago. This was the first time I’d ever actually seen a pig’s face for sale. Likewise some of its more significant
but rarely displayed organs.
Several steps down there were strangely constructed but delicious-looking dumplings on great metal plates: vegetables I had never heard of; gorgeous things being tossed and chivvied in woks; fruit more interesting and better displayed even than in
Paris.
This was, I told myself, less a market than a 12-course banquet. People grinned and posed for my camera or sometimes waved me away irritably. Convivial diners at groups of tables beckoned me over to join them. As the light faded and the hiss of gas lamps grew louder, making the cheerful faces at the stalls the kind of red and gold that you’d normally use Photoshop to correct, the joy of the whole place grew even more fiercely on me. And, I found to my surprise, emotionally too.
The next day we filmed an edition of our TV programme there, and the emotion had remained. So much so, that when we struggled back up the many more than 18 steps and spotted a fortune-teller, I thought I should consult him.
I don’t, I feel I have to say, believe in fortune-tellers. The most I think they ever possess is a kind of telepathic instinct, which we ourselves bulk out in our own minds because something in us makes us want it to be true. And why, anyway, should we need a fortune-teller to tell us how many wives or sisters or brothers we have? But in my case it was a desire to dip a foot into the culture of this place — and perhaps to see how phoney the fortune-teller was.
He masked his phoniness beautifully. He added together the numbers of my time and date of birth, felt my pulse, and told me (correctly) how many marriages and children I had had. Then, using a clever formula, he produced a piece
of folded paper I had selected earlier. This, apparently, proved that I was just about to become fabulously rich. What, I asked him, at the age of 65, and working for the BBC? The crowd laughed extravagantly at that, as crowds had laughed at earlier fortune-tellers on this spot for centuries.
And now it’s all gone: teahouse, hog’s face and dumpling stalls, fruit barrows, fortune-teller, the 18 Steps, impossible
to re-create. Instead we have another
Daejeon or Croydon. Just what we need.
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
