Liziba Station

Overview

Liziba is a stop on Line 2 of the Chongqing monorail where the trains run through the sixth, seventh and eighth floors of a nineteen-storey block of flats. The station platforms are inside the building; shops occupy the floors below and people live in the floors above. It has been like this since the line opened on 18 June 2005, and since 2018 the city has built a viewing platform on the street below purely so that visitors can photograph a train entering a residential building.

It is the most photographed piece of infrastructure in a city that is famous for its infrastructure, and the photograph takes about fifteen minutes to get: trains are frequent, the platform is free, and the whole thing is on the way between the centre and Eling Park on the ridge above.

The engineering point is the one worth remembering. The building was not there first. Station and block were designed together and built as a single structure, which is why the track can pass through the middle of it with only a 20-centimetre gap to the walls.

History

Planning for the station began in 1998, when Chongqing’s first rail transit line was being laid along the north bank of the Yuzhong peninsula, squeezed between the cliff and the Jialing. Line 2 is a straddle-beam monorail rather than a conventional metro, and the Liziba stretch, between the cliff and the river, is where space was tightest.

The answer was to put the station inside a building that was going up anyway. The design team, led by Ye Tianyi of the civil engineering faculty at Chongqing University, revised the scheme at least six times before it was fixed; the result was the first “through-building” station on the Chinese mainland. The station occupies floors six to eight, with two side platforms and a 3,500-square-metre concourse on the sixth floor, and the structure carries dedicated noise-reduction equipment so that the residents above hear little of what passes beneath them.

For its first decade it was simply a station. Then the short-video apps found it, visitors started standing in the road, and in August 2018 the city completed a viewing platform of about 1,500 square metres beside the line, 840 of them set aside for photography. A small museum of old Chongqing newspapers, the Bayu Old News Museum, opened in the station in March 2019 with reproductions of papers from 1891 to 1954. A plan in 2020 to hang a large LED screen on the building was dropped after public objections that it would distract drivers on the road below.

Visiting

Take Line 2 to Liziba; the station is between Niujiaotuo and Fotuguan, and trains run from 06:30 to 23:50. Arriving by train gives you the first half of the experience: the monorail slows, the building closes around it, and the platform is a lit slot inside the block. Get off, then find the exit to Lizibazheng Street and walk down to road level.

The viewing platform is on the riverside pavement below the building, opposite the point where the track enters the wall. It is free and open at all hours. Stand at the marked photography area and wait; in daytime a train passes every few minutes in each direction, and the shot everyone wants is the train halfway into the building with the balconies above it. Ten to twenty minutes is enough.

The address for taxis is 39 Lizibazheng Street, Yuzhong District. The station has three exits: one to Lizibazheng Street and the platform, one to Guihuayuan Road, and one that serves the Liziba anti-aircraft tunnel park, a stretch of the wartime shelters dug into the cliff during the Japanese bombing of the city.

Tips

Ride through rather than just watching. A single fare on Line 2 from Jiaochangkou is a few yuan and the approach along the Jialing, on a monorail hung above the river road, is one of the better free views in the city.

Late morning on a weekday is the quiet time on the platform. Weekend afternoons are a scrum, and Golden Week is worse.

Do not stand in the road for the angle. The platform was built because people did.

Take the stairs up to Eling Park afterwards. The park entrance is above the station on the ridge, and the tower there looks straight down on the line you just rode.

Nearby

Eling Park sits on the ridge directly above the station, a short steep walk, with the best daytime panorama of both rivers from its seven-storey pavilion.

Hongya Cave is east on Line 2 at Linjiangmen; stay on the same train.

Ciqikou, the old porcelain port, is on Line 1: change at Jiaochangkou and ride out towards Shapingba.

The riverside road below the station runs east to the Yangtze River Cableway at Xiaoshizi and the docks at Chaotianmen, both covered on the city page.