Liziba: The Train That Runs Through an Apartment Building

Welcome to one of the strangest sights in urban China — and trust me, that’s a competitive category. This is Liziba (pronounced lee-dzuh-BAH), where every few minutes, a full-sized metro train flies straight through the middle of a 19-story apartment building. Not past it. Not under it. Through it — entering one side between the 6th and 8th floors, and popping out the other.

Your first question is probably the same one everyone asks: was this a mistake? Quite the opposite. The building and the station were designed together, as one project, from day one. The train belongs to Chongqing’s Line 2, one of China’s first monorail lines, and here’s the elegant part: the rail structure and the residential building are completely independent structures — they touch nowhere, separated by a gap of about 20 centimeters. The train also runs on rubber tires rather than steel wheels, so residents say the noise is no worse than a dishwasher running. People genuinely live their daily lives a few floors above and below a metro line.

The 8D city

Why build something so eccentric? One word: geography. Chongqing is nicknamed the “8D city.” It’s built on steep mountains at the meeting point of two rivers, so nothing here is flat. Roads stack on top of roads; you can walk out of the 1st floor of a building and somehow also walk out of the 22nd floor of the same building onto another street. GPS apps famously give up here. When flat land doesn’t exist, you don’t go around the building — you negotiate with it. Liziba is the city’s engineering philosophy in a single frame.

There is another layer to this place, easy to miss: walk five minutes along the street below and you’ll find the Liziba Anti-Japanese War Relic Park, a cluster of preserved 1930s–40s buildings. During World War II, Chongqing was China’s wartime capital, enduring years of relentless aerial bombing — the citizens carved shelters into these same mountainsides and simply refused to break. Locals will tell you that spirit has a name here: the character of a “mountain city.” A train through a building and a city that wouldn’t surrender — they’re the same stubbornness, seventy years apart.

Getting the shot

Below the station there’s a dedicated viewing platform, built in 2018 precisely because thousands of visitors were standing in traffic to film this. Trains come every few minutes in each direction, so you won’t wait long. Three tips:

1. Shoot video, not photos — the whole point is the motion, and the train takes about ten seconds to pass through.
2. Stand back and go wide, so you capture the full height of the building with the train punching through its waistline.
3. For the classic social-media trick, have a friend film you in the foreground “catching” the train in your palm.

Once you have your shot, don’t rush off. Ride the escalator up and take Line 2 itself for one or two stops — the track hugs the cliff along the Jialing River, and it’s one of the most scenic metro rides in the world, for the price of a subway ticket. Or head up to Eling Park on the hilltop nearby, where the pavilion gives you a panorama of the two rivers and the skyline — the view that explains, in one glance, why this city had to build a train through a building.

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Adapted from the LoreLens audio guide for Liziba. Point the LoreLens app at the building and hear the full story while you wait for the next train.