It’s only when the sky clears in the afternoon, if the sky clears, that shiny high rises and construction cranes appear, stretching as far as the eye can see.

Once a quiet port city of 200,000 people perched at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, nestled in the mountains of central China, Chongqing today has transformed into a sprawling metropolis. The city center and surrounding districts and municipalities are home to nearly 33 million, roughly the population of all of Canada. (Read about another megacity, Dhaka in Bangladesh, which is the world’s fastest-growing.)

That’s a lot of people, even by Chinese standards, and the number is still growing. Chongqing’s population increases by an estimated 200,000 people a year, or the population of Rochester, N.Y.

Chongqing began its first great development push in 1997, when the city separated from Sichuan province and became its own municipality. In the process, it swallowed up an additional 82,400 square kilometers (32,000 square miles). It’s now larger than Austria.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china/100915/development-chongqing-cities