What is Chongqing famous for?
I came across this question on Quora and thought I’d take a stab.
Traditionally, Chongqing is famous (or infamous, depending on how you see it) for it’s three hots:
Hot Food. Chongqingren like their food spicy. And not just hot, but also numbing. If it it’s not mala (麻辣), it’s not spicy enough. Along with some shared dishes with Sichuanese cuisine, Chongqing is all about the hot pot (火锅), a fondue-like dining experience with hot red soup of boiling oil containing both chilies and Sichuan peppers into which the locals dip meats and innards and sweat away the evening.
Hot Weather. Some strange micro-climate conditions (mountains, two rivers, etc) result in China’s hottest, most humid summer weather. For this, Chongqing is known as one of China’s Three Furnaces (三大火炉) alongside Wuhan and Nanjing. Temperatures commonly reach upper 30s (C) and into the 40s for long stretches of time in July and August. In fact, the summer of 2011 was the hottest on record since the 1950s.
Hot Women. Chongqing is proud of its pretty ladies. There are many theories explaining how Chongqing’s women got to be so beautiful. Some sound like old wives tales (it’s the humidity, it’s the mountains, it’s the rivers) and others are more scientific (it’s the diversity of the gene pool from the many times China packed up and moved to Chongqing when it served as a temporary capital). Whatever the reasons, Chongqing ladies will continue wearing little black shorts with tights all through the winter to “HOLD住” their spicy reputation.
Aside from it’s hotness, Chongqing is also famous for a few new things:
- Bo Xilai’s policies and economic models
- Red songs
- The Five Chongqings (roughly Health, Safe, Livable, Accessible, Forrest)
- Food safety issues like gutter oil and Walmart’s fake organic pork
- Rapid development and questionable architecture
- Three Gorges Dam project
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