Chongqing
— — a city built on its own ridges, in fog the rivers make.
Not only on a wall.
“A mountain city at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing, where neighborhoods stack so steeply that the eighth floor of one building opens onto the street of another. Fog from the rivers settles into the valleys most cool-season mornings. At night the stilt-house quarter of Hongyadong lights up amber against the black water, and the cable car still crosses the Yangtze the way it did in the 1980s.
Chongqing, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chongqing is a directly administered municipality in southwest China, set at the confluence of the Yangtze River and its tributary the Jialing. The administrative region covers some 82,400 square kilometers and registers a population above 32 million, though the dense urban core on the peninsula between the two rivers holds around 9 million. The city sits on hilly karst terrain rather than the flat alluvial plain typical of Chinese megacities, which is why it lacks the bicycle culture of Beijing or Shanghai and why funicular and cable-car transit remained useful long into the metro era.
Both rivers run brown with sediment most of the year, and they meet at Chaotianmen at the tip of the Yuzhong peninsula, where the Jialing's clearer green water folds visibly into the heavier Yangtze. Three Gorges Dam, completed downstream in 2003 and raised to full pool by 2010, lifted the river level at Chongqing's docks by roughly 30 meters and turned what had been rapids into deep navigable water. River cruises east toward Yichang and the gorges still board here, just as they did before the dam was built.
After dark the Yuzhong skyline turns on a coordinated lightshow on the towers above the rivers, and the Hongyadong stilt-house quarter on the Jialing bank glows amber against the water for the cameras gathered on the Qiansimen bridge. The Yangtze Cableway, opened in 1987, still crosses the river at night for less than two yuan, swaying above the lit harbor. The fog of the cool months catches all of it and turns the city into a soft, layered glow that locals call its signature look.