Though Anthony Bourdain visited neighbouring Chengdu twice—once for No Reservations (2006) and again for Parts Unknown (2016), he never visited Chongqing (重庆), which is a shame because I think it would have been right in his wheelhouse. This is what I imagine he might have written if he had.

Chongqing doesn’t care what you think.

This isn’t Beijing with its imperial grandeur, or Shanghai showing off its Art Deco bones and glass towers. This is thirty million people you’ve never heard of, stacked on top of each other on mountains shrouded in fog, at the confluence of two rivers that have been drowning secrets for millennia.

You want spicy? You think you know spicy? You don’t know spicy. This is Chongqing’s handshake: a boiling cauldron of hotpot bubbling with enough chillies to make a grown man weep, and the locals? They’re just getting started. They’ll eat this at midnight, in summer, in 100-degree heat with 100 percent humidity, because that’s what you do here.

The city itself is a fever dream of bridges stacked on bridges, roads that tunnel through apartment buildings, a skyline glowing through the fog like some industrial port city that decided vertical was the only direction left. You take the elevator to the first floor and you’re somehow on the twenty-second. Geography is a suggestion. Logic is optional.

But here’s the thing: while Beijing was busy being the capital and Shanghai was counting its money, Chongqing was feeding people. Real working-class food. The kind that stains your shirt and burns in your gut hours later. Noodles pulled by hand at 5 AM. Skewers grilled on corners where the smoke mingles with the perpetual mist. Food that doesn’t apologise, doesn’t need you to post it on Instagram.

But you can’t eat hotpot forever. So you go looking for the other Chongqing. The one that isn’t just about your tongue catching fire.

First stop: Teyuan, the Democratic Parties History Museum. Yeah, you read that right. Democratic parties—plural—in China. It’s housed in this beautiful garden compound where, back in the 1940s, Mao and Zhou Enlai met with the non-Communist parties to hash out what the new China would look like. Spoiler alert: things didn’t quite work out the way those other parties hoped. But here’s the thing, the place is gorgeous. Classical architecture, peaceful courtyards, the kind of space where you can imagine people believed, even briefly, that compromise was possible. History as it actually happened is messy and complicated. This museum doesn’t shy away from that. Much.

Then you descend. Literally. The Baiheliang Underwater Museum, where ancient stone fish and inscriptions recording 1,200 years of Yangtze River water levels now sit forty meters below the surface, drowned when they built the Three Gorges Dam. The Chinese solution? Build an underwater corridor so you can walk along the riverbed and peer through portholes at these carvings that used to mark drought and flood. It’s brilliant. It’s insane. It’s the most Chinese thing imaginable—we flooded our history, but don’t worry, you can still see it through reinforced glass while fish swim overhead. Progress and preservation in the same breath, whether they fit together or not.

816. The nuclear plant.

Deep in a hollowed-out mountain two hours outside the city, thousands of workers spent eighteen years carving out a massive underground complex designed to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. Cold War paranoia made real. Except they never finished it. Never produced a single gram of weapons-grade material. And now? Now you can tour it. Walk through cathedral-sized caverns, reactor halls, tunnels that go on forever. It’s eerie and spectacular and completely absurd. This monument to fear and ambition that never fulfilled its purpose, now lit with colored LEDs for tourists taking selfies where they were going to split atoms.

Here’s what gets you about China: nothing is permanent, even when it should be. A thousand-year-old historical record, drowned in twenty years. An eighteen-year nuclear project, abandoned before it ever functioned. High-speed rail lines that didn’t exist only a few years ago. The eternal mountains, carved and flooded and built over. Everything here exists in multiple timescales at once – ancient, modern, and whatever comes next, all happening simultaneously.

And then there was dinner with Liu.

Liu (not his real name) is a friend of a friend, an engineer at one of China’s big tech companies. His apartment is in one of those huge towers that pierce through the fog, the kind of place where the elevator ride takes long enough that you start to feel the pressure change in your ears. Floor-to-ceiling windows. The whole city spread out below.

Before dinner, he wants to show me his library. I’m expecting tech manuals, maybe some engineering journals. Instead: shelves lined with political theory, historical analysis, and multiple books about June 4th, 1989. Tiananmen. The “incident,” as it’s sometimes carefully called here.

So we talk.

Liu is smart. Well educated, speaks perfect English, reads voraciously. And he’s telling me, very earnestly, very calmly, why Xi Jinping’s relationship with Putin makes sense. Why historical claims in the South China Sea have merit. Why most Chinese people would support reunification with Taiwan, even if it got ugly. He’s citing dates, treaties, Western double standards. He’s not angry or defensive. He’s explaining, the way you’d explain why a bridge needs to be built a certain way.

And I’m sitting there, nodding, asking questions, trying to engage in good faith. Because that’s what you do. You listen. You try to understand how someone arrives at conclusions that make your brain hurt.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: I don’t know if I’m hearing what Liu actually believes or what he’s been conditioned to believe. Or whether there’s even a difference anymore. This is a man who can discuss Putin and Ukraine in his own home, not to condemn it, but to rationalise it through frameworks of territorial sovereignty and the long view of history. A man who can hold contradictions in his hands and feel no cognitive dissonance.

Maybe that makes him brainwashed. Maybe it makes me naive. Maybe we’re both products of our respective propaganda machines, and this conversation is just two well-educated guys talking past each other in a high-rise apartment while the Yangtze flows far below.

The dinner is incredible, by the way. His wife has prepared dishes I can’t even name. We drink. We laugh. And for a while, we don’t talk about politics at all.

But I leave his apartment unsettled. Not angry. Not self-righteous. Just… unsettled. Because this is the thing they don’t tell you about travel: sometimes you meet people you genuinely like, people who are generous and thoughtful and complicated, and you realise the gulf between you isn’t about understanding. You understand each other just fine. The gulf is about something deeper, something that good food and good conversation can’t quite bridge.

On my last day, I get an email from the airline. My flight to Beijing has been moved to a different aircraft: a Comac C919. China’s homegrown commercial jet. The one that hasn’t received international safety approval yet.

And I’m sitting there in my hotel room, staring at this email, genuinely trying to figure out if I want to get on this plane.

Is it safe? Probably. The Chinese government has staked enormous prestige on this thing. They’re not going to let it fall out of the sky. But then again, I’ve just spent three days in a city that’s shown me how little I understand about what happens here. And now I’m supposed to bet my life on a plane that exists as much for national pride as for transportation?

Of course I get on the plane.

It’s fine. Smooth takeoff, comfortable seats, professional crew. And as we climb above Chongqing’s fog, they play a video on the overhead screens: a glossy little propaganda film about the history of Chinese aviation, narrated like an underdog story where China is both hero and victor. It’s slick and earnest and I can’t tell if I’m supposed to find it inspiring or absurd.

That’s Chongqing. All of it. The hotpot and the high-rises, the flooded museum and the abandoned bomb factory, the generous host with the unshakeable certainty, and the moment you board a plane you’re not entirely sure you trust. Contradictions that somehow don’t cancel each other out, even when they should. A place that will feed you, fascinate you, unsettle you, and make you question what you think you know.