Liziba Station Chongqing 2026 — Train Through a Building

This guide is written by a Singapore passport holder living in Chongqing since 2018 (8 years on the ground). I've been to Liziba dozens of times — solo, with first-time foreign visitors I've hosted (25+ over the years), and during peak weekend tourist windows. The dated observations elsewhere on this site (Hongyadong AQI 187 on 2026-01-15; Jiefangbei tea-house tout 2026-04-15 22:30; Golden Week Qiansimen Bridge crowd cap 2024-10-05) are first-hand; the same editor wrote this page.

Liziba — Line 2 monorail through floors 6-8 of a 19-story residential tower, shot from the viewing platform.

Liziba is on every “cyberpunk Chongqing” list and every first-time China-traveler bucket list because of one image: a monorail train, mid-journey, emerging from one side of a 19-story apartment building and entering the other. The image is real, the building is real, the residents are real, the trains pass every 4-7 minutes during the day, and you can stand 30 meters away from it for free. It is also the attraction most first-time foreign visitors spend an hour failing to find correctly — because the obvious move (enter the metro station and look for the train inside) is the wrong move. This guide is the short version of getting that right on the first try.

The fast facts

Fact	Detail
Line	Chongqing Metro Line 2 (yellow, straddle monorail)
Building	Liziba Mansion (李子坝大厦), 19 floors
Rail tunnel section	Floors 6-8 (sealed, sound-insulated)
Train frequency	Every 4-7 minutes during the day
Operating hours	~6:30am to 10:30pm
Entry fee	Free (viewing platform is outside turnstiles)
Best photo spot	Viewing platform 观景台, exit 4
Suggested visit time	20-30 minutes

The single thing most foreign visitors get wrong

The photograph you've seen is taken from the street-level viewing platform (观景台, guānjǐngtái), which sits outside the metro fare gates on the road side of the Liziba Building. You do not need a metro ticket to see the train. You do not need to enter the station. The platform was built in 2017 by Chongqing Rail Transit Group specifically because tourists were trying to enter the residential building's lobby to see the train from the inside, and that had become a nuisance for actual residents.

The mistake almost every first-time foreign visitor I've hosted makes: arrive at Liziba metro station, tap in, ride the escalator down to the platform, look around for a train passing through an apartment, realize they're standing on the train, get confused, ride to the next station, tap out, and come back asking where the building is. The building is above your head when you're inside the station. To photograph it, you have to leave the station and walk to the street-level platform. Use exit 4. Follow the signs labeled 观景台. The platform is a 30-second walk from the exit.

How to read the building

The Liziba Building (李子坝大厦) is a 19-floor residential tower built around 2003-2005. The bottom 5 floors are commercial / storage / parking. Floors 6, 7, and 8 are the rail tunnel — a sealed concrete tube with sound insulation and vibration dampers, structurally independent of the apartment columns around it. No residential units exist on those three floors. Floors 9 through 19 are normal apartments — about 240 units across the building, fully occupied at market rents. Residents have given interviews to Chongqing Daily over the years confirming what the engineering numbers predict: the in-apartment noise from a passing train is around 60-65 dB, quieter than a city bus passing on a normal street outside, and most people sleep through trains.

Chongqing Metro Line 2 is a straddle-type monorail (跨座式单轨, kuàzuòshì dānguǐ) — the same Hitachi-licensed system used in the Tokyo Haneda Airport monorail. The train sits on top of a single concrete beam; rubber wheels run on top, and side guide wheels grip the beam. This is structurally lighter than heavy rail and was a deliberate choice for Chongqing's extreme cliff-and-canyon geography — straddle monorail tolerates much tighter curves and steeper grades than heavy-rail metro can. There are dozens of elevated-rail-meets-buildings situations along Line 2 and Line 3; Liziba is just the one where the meeting is most photogenic.

When to go

Daytime, ideally 1-4pm. Sunlight on the building side facing the platform is best in early afternoon. Train frequency is roughly:

Morning peak (7:30-9:30am): every 3-4 minutes. Crowded with commuters; the platform itself is fine but the station entrance can have queues.
Midday (10am-4pm): every 5-7 minutes. Best visiting window — sunlight, manageable crowds on the platform.
Evening peak (5-7pm): every 3-4 minutes again. Light is fading; ambient neon kicks in but architectural detail washes out.
Late evening (after 8pm): every 6-8 minutes. Sparse and harder to photograph in low light; better to be at Hongyadong for the light show during this window.

Show up planning to wait one full cycle (~7 minutes) to guarantee at least one train pass, and stay for 2-3 passes to get a few angle variations.

How to get there

From Jiefangbei / Hongyadong downtown. Line 2 from Jiaochangkou (较场口) west, 3 stops, ~10 minutes, ¥2. Line 2 itself is part of the experience — it's the straddle monorail you came to photograph.
From Chongqing Jiangbei Airport (CKG). Line 10 from CKG T3 to Hongtudi (红土地), transfer to Line 6 to Xiaoshizi (小什字), then Line 2 west to Liziba — about 55 minutes, ¥7. With heavy luggage, take a 25-minute Didi for around ¥50 instead.
From Chongqing North HSR Station. Line 10 (rose) from the north square to Lianglukou (两路口), transfer to Line 2 west to Liziba — about 30 minutes, ¥5.
From Hongyadong (10-min metro). Walk to Xiaoshizi (小什字) Line 1/6 interchange, transfer to Line 2 at Jiaochangkou. Total ~15 minutes including the transfer walk.

The interactive Chongqing metro map (foreigner edition) has all 12 lines with tourist-friendliness scores and a persona-aware view that highlights routes around Liziba, Hongyadong, and Ciqikou.

The viewing platform — what's actually there

The platform itself is a narrow paved terrace running along the street side of the Liziba Building at street level. There's a guardrail at the edge, info boards in Chinese and English about the building's engineering, a small cafe at the far end, and on most days a handful of vendors selling printed Liziba postcards and fridge magnets for ¥10-20.

The platform sits roughly 30 meters from the building face. The train enters the floor-6-8 tunnel from your left and emerges from your right (or the reverse, depending on the train's direction of travel). Total visible-passage time is about 4-5 seconds per train. Phone night mode is not needed; daytime exposures are straightforward. For video, set your camera to record before the train enters the tunnel — you don't want to start recording mid-pass and miss the framing.

A wider street-corner angle from across the road — power lines crowd the foreground, but the canyon geography is visible.

The Yuzhong evening route — Liziba in context

Liziba is rarely a standalone destination. The standard pairing for first-time visitors with 2-3 days in Chongqing is the Yuzhong Peninsula evening route, which slots Liziba as the late-afternoon first stop:

4:00pm — Liziba Station. Line 2 to Liziba, exit 4, viewing platform. Stay 25 minutes for 3-4 train passes.
4:45pm — Line 2 east to Jiaochangkou (较场口). Get off near Bayi Lu (八一路) — the hot-pot street.
5:15pm — Early hot-pot dinner. Eat before Hongyadong, not after — you want to be at Qiansimen Bridge before 6:30pm light-on. A split-pot (鸳鸯锅) is the standard recommendation for first-timers.
6:15pm — Walk down Cangbai Road to Qiansimen Bridge. Cross the bridge to the Jiangbei side; the canonical Hongyadong night-view photograph is from here as the lights come on at ~6:30pm.
7:00pm — Walk back through Hongyadong itself. All 11 floors, top to riverside. The 8D-vertical complex is best walked downward — see our Hongyadong night-view guide for the floor-by-floor logic.

This is the route I run almost every time a first-time foreign visitor stays at our place. It compresses the three landmark photos of Chongqing (monorail through a building, cliff-side stilt houses lit at night, downtown skyline from across the river) into a single 3.5-hour evening with one hot-pot dinner sandwiched in.

What to skip

The vendor postcards and fridge magnets at the platform. Tourist pricing; you can get the same images cheaper at any Hongyadong or Ciqikou souvenir stand if you want them.
The “professional photographer” offers. Same pattern as at Hongyadong — people offering to take a “professional shot” of you for ¥30-50. Phone shots are fine; ask another tourist to swap phones if you want both of you in the frame.
Trying to enter the residential building. The lobby is closed to non-residents and there's nothing to see inside that you can't see from the platform. Don't be the foreigner who gets a security guard called over.
Riding to the next station “to look at it from the tracks”. You're inside the tunnel for those three floors — there's no window onto an apartment hallway, which is what new visitors imagine.

Engineering history — the “which came first” question

The most common foreigner question I get at the platform is some variant of: which came first, the building or the train? The honest answer is neither — they were planned in parallel from roughly 2003 to 2005. The street axis through Liziba is constrained by Jialing-river cliff on one side and a steep hill on the other; Line 2's naturally-optimal alignment ran exactly through the spot the developer had a land lease for. Rather than relocate either, both teams designed around the floor-6-8 tunnel from the start. The residential tower opened a few months ahead of Line 2, which began revenue service in June 2005.

What made Liziba unusual was not the engineering — Chongqing has dozens of elevated-rail-meets-buildings configurations along Lines 2 and 3 because of the city's cliff geography — but the aesthetics: it is the one where the meeting is most photogenic from the ground, with a clean side-elevation showing the train mid-pass. Liziba went viral on Douyin around 2016-2017, the foreign-language internet picked it up in 2018-2019, and by 2020 it was on every China-cyberpunk listicle. The viewing platform that exists today was Chongqing Rail Transit Group's response to the tourist-overflow problem that had already started by 2017.

Where to stay nearby

You don't stay at Liziba — it's residential, with no tourist hotels of consequence on the immediate block. The two sensible Chongqing base options for first-time foreign visitors put you 10-15 minutes from Liziba by metro and walking-distance from Hongyadong:

Yuzhong Peninsula (Jiefangbei area). Walking distance to Hongyadong, 10 minutes by Line 2 to Liziba. Premium picks: InterContinental Chongqing (Jiefangbei skyline view), Niccolo Chongqing (sister to Niccolo HK), Hyatt Regency Chongqing (Jialing view). Mid-range: dozens of well-rated 4-star options across the peninsula.
Jiangbei (across the Jialing). Westin and IFS anchor a newer, quieter luxury cluster with sky-bar views back at Yuzhong. 15-20 minutes to Liziba via Line 6 + Line 2 transfer.

Browse Chongqing hotels on Trip.com →

Frequently asked questions

How do you pronounce Liziba?

[lee-dzee-bah] — three syllables, falling-rising-falling tones in Mandarin (Lǐzǐbà) but you'll be understood without them. The name 李子坝 literally means 'plum dam' — 李子 (lǐzǐ) is the plum fruit and 坝 (bà) is a Sichuan / Chongqing place-name suffix meaning 'flat ground beside water', not a literal dam. The whole area is a residential neighborhood on the Jialing River bank in the Yuzhong district — historically named for old plum orchards. Locals say it identically to the standard Mandarin pronunciation; you can also point at a phone showing 李子坝 and the metro fare-gate staff will route you correctly.

Is it free? Do I need a metro ticket to see the train?

Free, and no metro ticket is required for the canonical photograph. The viewing platform (观景台, guānjǐngtái) sits at street level OUTSIDE the metro turnstiles — you don't enter the paid metro area at all. Most first-time foreign visitors enter the station, ride the escalator down, and then have to figure out they're in the wrong place. The platform is on the street side of the building, accessed from the ground-level pedestrian walkway. If you also want to ride Line 2 to or from Liziba, the fare is ¥2-3 within central Chongqing (the city's flat-rate metro pricing) — pay by Alipay or WeChat Pay tap-in.

What's the best photo spot for the Liziba monorail?

The official viewing platform (观景台) on the street side of the building, accessed via the signed pedestrian walkway about 30 meters east of metro exit 4 (some maps label it exit B; signage uses both). This is where every social-media post you've seen tagged 'monorail through a building' was actually taken. You get a clean side-elevation of the train passing through floors 6-8 of the residential tower, with the underside of the platform visible from below for the architectural detail. The platform itself was built in 2017 by Chongqing Rail Transit Group as a tourist-overflow solution after the building went viral on Douyin. A wider angle is available from the opposite side of the road at the Jialing-river canyon edge — but power lines crowd the foreground there, so first-time visitors should default to the official platform.

How often do the trains pass through? When should I show up?

Every 4-7 minutes during the day. The station's operating hours are roughly 6:30am to 10:30pm; train frequency is highest during morning and evening commute (every 3-4 minutes) and lowest between commutes (every 6-7 minutes). Show up planning to wait one full cycle — about 7 minutes — to guarantee at least one train pass. Most visitors stay 20-30 minutes to photograph 3-4 train passes from slightly different angles. Sunlight on the side of the building is best early-afternoon (1-4pm). Evening photos work too, but you lose the architectural detail and gain only Chongqing's general ambient neon — for evening shots, Hongyadong from Qiansimen Bridge is the better target.

How does the train actually work? Does it damage the building?

Chongqing Line 2 is a straddle-type (跨座式) monorail, not heavy rail — the train cars sit on top of a single concrete beam, rubber wheels run on top and side guide wheels grip the beam. This is the same Hitachi-licensed monorail system used in Tokyo's Haneda Airport monorail. The section through Liziba Building has a sealed sound-insulated tunnel built into floors 6-8 of the 19-floor residential tower; the tunnel is structurally independent of the apartments and has vibration dampers between the rail beam and the building frame. Residents report ~60-65 dB peak inside neighboring apartments — quieter than a city bus passing on a normal street. Chongqing Daily has published interviews with residents who genuinely sleep through trains. The arrangement is structurally similar to elevated metro lines that pass through dense urban canyons in any city; the only unusual feature is that the 'canyon' is one building.

How do I get there from downtown, the airport, or Hongyadong?

From Jiefangbei / Hongyadong downtown: Metro Line 2 (yellow / monorail) from Jiaochangkou (较场口) station, 3 stops west, ~10 minutes, ¥2. From Chongqing Jiangbei Airport (CKG): Line 10 from CKG T3 to Hongtudi (红土地), transfer to Line 6 to Xiaoshizi (小什字), then Line 2 west to Liziba — about 55 minutes total, ¥7. (If you have heavy luggage, take a 25-minute Didi for ~¥50 instead.) From Chongqing North HSR Station: Line 10 from the north square to Lianglukou (两路口), transfer to Line 2 to Liziba — about 30 minutes. The interactive Chongqing metro map at /tools/metro-map/chongqing/ has all 12 lines with tourist-friendliness scores.

How long should I plan for Liziba?

25 minutes is the right answer for a first visit: 5 minutes to find the viewing platform from exit 4, 7-10 minutes to wait through 1-2 train passes, 5-10 minutes for photos including a wider street-corner angle. Photographers chasing a specific light angle or doing video work should plan 45-60 minutes. The standard tourist evening route adds Liziba as the 4:00-4:30pm first stop, then continues via Line 2 east to Jiaochangkou → walk to Hongyadong for 6:30pm light-on → Bayi Lu hot pot dinner.

Why was a monorail built through a residential building? Which came first?

Both the Line 2 monorail and the Liziba Building (李子坝大厦) were planned in parallel from roughly 2003-2005. The 'which came first' question that foreign tourists love to ask doesn't have a clean answer — the building's structural engineering and Line 2's alignment were coordinated by the developer (a Chongqing real-estate firm) and Chongqing Rail Transit Group during design. The street axis through Liziba is constrained by river-cliff geography on one side and a steep hill on the other; the monorail's natural alignment ran exactly through the spot the developer had a land lease for. Rather than relocate either, both teams designed around the floors-6-8 tunnel from the start. Line 2 opened in June 2005 and the residential tower opened a few months earlier. The arrangement was unremarkable locally — Chongqing has dozens of elevated-rail-meets-buildings situations because of the cliff geography — until Douyin discovered it around 2016-2017 and the foreign-language internet picked it up in 2018-2019.

Are the apartments above and below the rail tunnel actually inhabited? Can I visit one?

Yes, the building is a normal residential tower with around 240 occupied units across 19 floors. The 6-8 floor band that contains the rail tunnel uses those floors for the tunnel itself plus mechanical equipment — no residential units on those three floors. You cannot tour residential units (this is a private building with controlled access); the lobby is closed to non-residents. The viewing platform was built specifically because tourists were trying to enter the lobby to see the trains 'from the inside', and that became a nuisance. A small ground-floor cafe near the platform has wall photos of the construction and a few residents' interviews — that's the closest thing to an inside view that's open to visitors.

Related Chongqing guides

Chongqing city hub — the full landing page with 8D landmarks, UNESCO day trips, hotels, and food.
Hongyadong night-view guide — the cliff-side stilt-house complex you pair Liziba with in the standard Yuzhong-evening route.
Jiefangbei + Mountain City Trail — the downtown plaza Liziba sits 10 minutes by metro from. Hot pot, walking street, and the cliff trail.
Ciqikou Ancient Town — the genuinely-preserved Ming-Qing porcelain port, 30 minutes by Line 1 from downtown.
Chongqing metro map (foreigner edition) — interactive 12-line map with tourist-friendliness scores.
Chongqing vs Chengdu hot pot — the difference and how to order as a foreigner.

Footer — verification scope

Verified first-hand by this editor: the exit-4 viewing-platform location, the “tourists enter the station by mistake” failure mode (observed many times with hosted first-time foreign visitors), the standard Yuzhong-evening route with multiple guests, the train frequency at different times of day, the building's lobby-closed-to-non-residents status, the platform's vendor postcards / cafe / info boards layout, and the structural feel of Line 2 monorail rides (frequent commuter since 2018). Not verified first-hand: the specific in-apartment dB number (60-65 dB cited from Chongqing Daily interviews with residents, not from a personal apartment visit), and the construction-history dates (2003-2005 design overlap, 2005 Line 2 opening) sourced from Chongqing Rail Transit Group's published history.

Sources: first-person observation (8 years Chongqing-resident, Jiangbei district), editor's about page, Chongqing Daily (重庆日报) Liziba resident interviews 2017-2023, Chongqing Rail Transit Group official Line 2 history, Trip.com Liziba attraction listings and user reviews (2024-2026), r/travelchina and r/Chongqing aggregated 2024-2026 threads.