Chongqing - 32 million dynamics in China - Part 2

You may have seen my three-part photo essays from the tiny ancient village Shen’ao in China; it has about 1500 inhabitants. After that wonderful experience, I flew to a fast-growing metropolis, Chongqing, which could hardly have been a starker contrast. But then…you’ll also see some similarities. Allegedly, it is the most rapidly growing city in the world and, with 32 million inhabitants, already the world’s biggest (that you have probably never heard about). Here is Part 1.

Here is one of many intros, and here are many movies on YouTube. But please see my shots from there first, taken in October 2025. You’ll imagine that a few days in Chongqing can only produce rather superficial coverage, and that I have seen only a fraction of it. But even so, I believe in sharing what fascinates me – and I’d be happy if you’d decide to go there and visit for yourself.

But beware that in Chongqing, one must be prepared to wander up and down a cityscape carved into mountainsides so labyrinthine that every ascent reveals a surprise — and every descent risks losing one’s way entirely.

At first glance, these images may appear ‘touristic ‘, but that does neither justice to the city nor to the photographer. This is an artful, sometimes poetic, rendering of my walks around Chongqing, captured with my Xiaomi 14 Ultra (phone)cam. I hope you will linger a bit and see what is in each. I posted them with no sequence or priorities in mind; that reflects how mixed images constantly appear to you when you walk a place like Chongqing.

I hope you may share what you see – and one day visit this mind-boggling metropolis, or rather, kaleidoscopic civilisation like no other.

Most images are scrolled too quickly to be seen. Slow the moment, and the surface opens. Look deeper, and the image begins to speak. Enter it, and you find a world waiting — still, patient, present.

And oh – one more thing. It is Culture Night in Lund on September 19, 2026, and my studio exhibition shows these and other images from Shen’ao, the smallest, and Chongqing, the biggest – documentary and a few more artistic.

🪭