This City Is The Biggest And Most Populous In The World, And You’ve Probably Never Heard Of It

Give it some thought, maybe check your trivia handbooks, and perhaps you’ll come up with Anchorage – a city with barely one-30th the population of the Big Apple, but a land area of more than 4,420 square kilometers (1,707 square miles). That’s bigger than the entire state of Rhode Island – but it’s still a tiny blip on the map compared to some of the other contenders.

Go southwards, for example, and you’ll find Mexico City – a smaller footprint than Anchorage at “only” 1,485 square kilometers (573 square miles) in area, but with a population of more than 9.2 million, it dwarfs every single city in the US by headcount. Go further down the map, and São Paulo enters the chat, with a very similar physical size to Mexico City but more than 3 million extra residents.

But for true megacities, you have to leave the Western Hemisphere altogether. All but three of the 20 most populous cities in the world are in Asia – well, all but three-and-a-half, since number 10 is Istanbul – and going by area, it’s all but one. 

And right at the top of both lists – there’s Chongqing.

Where in the world is Chongqing?

As the name suggests, Chongqing is a city in China – but where exactly is this gigantic yet somehow unknown megacity? Well, it’s often said that China looks like a chicken: its head at the top right, facing towards Japan; its tail feathers at the back pushing into central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. See it?

So, with that in mind: Chongqing is sort of where the wings rest against the belly. It’s here, in other words:

It sits at the confluence of the Jialing River and the mighty Yangtze, and it’s fair to say it makes quite the geographical impression. 

“It is a place where neighborhoods cling to cliffs, connected by elevated roads 20 stories up in the air,” wrote Oliver Wainwright, architecture and design critic for the Guardian and veteran visitor of Chongqing, in January this year. “Metro lines emerge from tunnels through the mountains, only to plunge straight through the middle of residential skyscrapers, which themselves sprout improbably from the sheer slopes.” 

“To get to places that looked like a couple of blocks away, I found myself taking steep staircases that led to underground escalators, then across walkways to lifts that ferried me up the side of a cliff,” he recalled. “Cable cars swooshed past outdoor plazas, where what I thought was the ground level turned out to be the roof terrace of an office block, which plunged 30 stories down into the valley below.”

And it’s not just dramatic – it’s also huge. With an area of more than 82,400 square kilometers (31,815 square miles), this city – reminder: city – is roughly the same size as the entirety of Ireland or Austria. It’s bigger than Lake Superior; it’s as big as about half of Florida. It’s one city.

“In […] Chongqing, a map of any kind turns out to be almost entirely useless,” Wainwright wrote. “Built across a series of impossibly steep mountainsides and vertiginous valleys […] it is an astonishing urban phenomenon to behold – a vertically sprawling city that can only be understood in three dimensions.”

“The experience of navigating the city felt like being thrust into a cross between the movie Inception and a game of snakes and ladders,” he concluded. “It’s [a] thrilling, bewildering megalopolis.”

32 million and counting

Chongqing is big – but it’s not really as big as it claims. The huge footprint includes vast rural areas, whose overall size totals about 14 times that of the main urban zone.

That’s not really surprising – it’s hard to imagine a city the size of two and a half Belgiums would be totally built-up and urbanized all the way through. But it might make you wonder: does Chongqing really deserve its reputation as the world’s biggest city? Or is its record-breaking claim to fame just based on a cheeky loophole?

Well, no. The urban area of Chongqing may be much smaller than the city proper, but it also holds more than 70 percent of the population. And while the city hasn’t always been as big as it is now, it’s never been a nothing-burg: “The history of Chongqing traces back over 3,000 years,” points out a 2019 article in culture magazine Gestalten. “It has been the capital of the country, a leading river port and transportation hub long before the Qing Dynasty, and a focal part of the mainland for centuries.”

Despite its long history, though, yes – it’s really only recently that the city has gained its boundary-busting reputation. And its massive growth was no accident: “In 1968, China embarked on a journey of reform that saw its once closed-off Communist society open-up to the rapidly globalizing world around it,” Gestalten explains. “This transformation of mentality, economics, and culture was set to transform the People’s Republic of China into a modern superpower.”

At that point, Chongqing already had a pretty hefty population of around 2.3 million – a mind-bogglingly high number for the time. But with the attention of the Communist Party newly focused on the city, its infrastructure and population skyrocketed: by 1979, there were some 6.3 million residents; by 1983, the figure was about 13.9 million; by 1997, it had a population of nearly 28.8 million.

The speed of that increase has slowed somewhat, but still, the city today boasts more than 32 million people living within its boundaries. In short, while Chongqing “isn’t a new megacity conceived within the Chinese Communist Party overnight,” Gestalten says, it certainly is “an embodiment of China’s liberation to development, especially in the past five years.”

It’s not alone in that. Today, all of the top six biggest cities proper in the world are found in China, and there are no signs of slowing down. “China has turned itself into a well-oiled urbanization machine,” Gestalten says. “Its urbanization rate is set to almost double from 36 percent in 2002 to 70 percent in 2050, roughly an increase of 400-700 million people.”

Still, as China’s population growth slows to the point of declining, perhaps cities like Chongqing have seen their peak already. But even if that’s the case – well, with 32 million residents and a footprint the size of multiple European countries and US states, that’s a pretty big peak.