This is a 48-story building with at least 250 small shops with names, but only four passenger elevators. Legend has it that it's your turn to get on the elevator during rush hour, which takes 1 hour. It happened that the summer in Chongqing can be as high as 40 degrees, but there are still many young people waiting in line for the elevator in the lobby without air conditioning, even if they are sweating.

In order to climb the famous magical world in Chongqing-Building A of Hongding International-and enjoy the happiness on earth.

In Guanyin Bridge, an old business district with a status comparable to that of Nanjing East Road Pedestrian Street in Shanghai, the old Hongding International Block A is a mysterious existence. The four passenger elevators in the building serve thirteen or four shops and their customers on each floor. The middle of the building is hollowed out, and two patios vertically run through the 48th floor, from which you can see the balcony of every household.

Hongding International is worthy of its name, based in Chongqing and looking at the world. In Block A, there is a private kitchen under the banner of molecular cuisine, which can be replaced by free cat and coffee, beauty training institutions and tattoo shops, popular Ins afternoon tea, an appointment massage that is not easy to open, as well as a board game bar and a private cinema.

Chongqing, a mountain city with a population of more than 8 million, has never lacked "wonders" that make people in the plain and hilly areas stunned. Chongqing is the city with the largest number of high-rise buildings in the west of China. There are 55 high-rise buildings over 200 meters built in San Francisco, which is also a mountain city, and the number is less than 20. Houses are built on the mountain, row upon row, and there is a scene of "the first floor is the top floor".

Because of its small land area and high population density, Chongqing has been developing vertically since the beginning of urban planning. It is not uncommon for Hongding International to merge all roadside stores in the same building in Chongqing. Similar to Hong Kong, large and small stores in Chongqing are vertically distributed in various buildings in different business districts. There is a frog's fish head on the first floor, and children's training institutions and "debt collection" signs are hung on the other floor.

But among all the high-rise buildings in Chongqing, Hongding International, with its plain appearance, is definitely a miracle.

Noon 1 1: 30. This is the time when Hongding International Building A really wakes up. One by one, people impatiently press the elevator to go downstairs. On the balcony of the patio and in the corridor, the aunt who works in a private kitchen moves out of the bench and peels beans and prepares vegetables at the door.

The entertainment life in Chongqing ends late every day, and the day starts late. It is said that Chongqing has the concept of night market since the Tang Dynasty, while modern night markets such as Huangjueping and Keyuan No.4 Road have been formed since the early 1990s. Therefore, men, women and children here have long been accustomed to staying up late and going out at night. It is not uncommon for them to dance a square dance after dinner and then make an appointment with their little sister to burn it home.

Hongding International, like the snack street and barbecue shop in Guanyin Bridge downstairs, will not have a peak season until evening: young people and children who have just left the school begin to go out, and the star lights hanging in the windows of the building are turned on, and the signboard marked "Tik Tok Recommended" begins to light up. During the day, invisible security guards will suddenly appear and loudly greet people waiting for the elevator in the lobby on the first floor.

But during the day, Hongding International is just a dark and quiet commercial and residential building. If the scenery in the courtyard of Block A can give you some business clues, then Blocks B and C, which are connected with the hanging garden, look like ordinary cheap commercial buildings.

You never know what happened in this huge city fortress. It allows young people from different circles to find a sense of belonging, and it is also a buffer zone for young entrepreneurs to start in this city.

Huang Ying, born in 1992, runs the high-altitude afternoon tea shop "Miss Ting" on the 43rd floor of Building A of Hongding International, which just opened in March this year. Huang Yirou worked as a medical beauty consultant in a plastic surgery hospital after graduation. He often works overtime, but his income is good.

Huang Yingrou is tired of office life from nine to five and works against her will from time to time. So she resigned with her friends and went to a high-rise shop in Block A of Hongding International. At first, she wanted to open a high-altitude B&B with the same style, but the fierce competition and higher investment of B&B made her choose an afternoon tea shop that did not need a kitchen and a large area. There are natural advantages in opening high-altitude afternoon tea in Chongqing with dense high-rise buildings. Instead of recruiting part-time employees, she and her friends took turns greeting guests in the store.

High-altitude afternoon tea is one of the hottest businesses for young girls, especially small red book users. There are often different exquisite scenes and high-rise buildings overlooking the city in the store. As long as you come to the store to buy afternoon tea, you can stay and shoot all afternoon, so that the mobile phone photo album can be installed. Among them, the first famous one is an afternoon tea shop named Pétales in Shi Xia, Futian, Shenzhen. In the big bed cover of this store, girls can take photos of online celebrities pretending to stay in five-star hotels in Hong Kong.

"Chongqing people are very generous and aggressive," Huang Yingrou said. "It is not difficult to resign and start a business. We will say that this is called honesty and frankness. "

Chongqing's informal urban temperament may be reflected in the fact that even in an afternoon tea shop that pays great attention to service and exquisiteness, there is no greeting between the boss and the guests. A guest today may become a friend or employee of the shopkeeper tomorrow.

On the 40th floor of Building A of Hongding International, there is the most popular wedding experience hall "BIANCHE Aries Dream" among young girls in Chongqing, which is engaged in the business of combining high-altitude afternoon tea, Instagram-style photo album and wedding experience. The owner is 1996, a beautiful girl named Zhang Xue.

A 19-year-old guest who often comes to the store to take pictures-who is also from Chongqing-has a speculative chat with Zhang Xue. Every time he visits, he remembers to buy Zhang Xue a cup of milk tea and help greet the guests. Later, in the summer peak season, she became a regular part-time job of Zhang. Between the owners and customers here, there are also some peers' trust and nature. "Please sit down for a while, and I'll get some tea." Two well-dressed young girls came to the shop. Huang Yingrou, the owner of the 43rd floor, greeted her in Chongqing dialect and then disappeared safely into another room. After a while, she served the cake and tea, and naturally sat behind the counter, eating the take-out of hot and sour powder. The girls sat in the white bathtub and the scenery outside the window and started taking selfies.

In many retail formats of Hongding International and even Chongqing, the relationship between shopkeepers and guests has some Jianghu flavor of Chongqing: not far, not close, just right, direct and impolite.

"Chongqing is a city that is very Jianghu and despises scholar temperament. You can't say you are a doctor or something here, people will think you are pretending. Even if you have culture, you should be grounded, "said Aris, a Chongqing native.

This grounding gas makes Chongqing's small and micro retail business particularly prosperous, and the city is relatively friendly to new small and micro entrepreneurs. Even in districts and counties outside the 9 th district of the main city, Chongqing is a huge consumer market with a population of 30 million, with great potential for tapping potential customers; Chongqing is also particularly suitable for catering-related entrepreneurship: Chongqing Statistics Bureau shows that the total retail sales of consumer goods in Chongqing exceeds the national average almost every quarter, and the retail revenue of catering is the highest double-digit growth among all categories. From June to August this year, the total retail sales of social consumer goods in Chongqing increased by 8.6%, and the retail sales of catering industry increased by 13.7% year-on-year.

Hongding International is an experimental field for young people to resign and start businesses. Zhang Xue, the boss of BIANCHE Aries Dream, also resigned and started a business. Her original occupation was real estate sales. Because of her hard work, she decided to be her own boss. Not to mention the owners of small bars, dogs, cats and board games in the building, most of them are born after 90 with entrepreneurial dreams.

But the reason why young entrepreneurs gather in Hongding International is that the rent is cheap.

In Guanyin Bridge, the second largest business district in Chongqing, Hongding International, with general hardware facilities, is almost the cheapest rental property. Times Street, developed by Longhu Real Estate, a local developer in Chongqing, is located in the downstairs of Hongding International, including all kinds of specialty stores from Muji to Louis Vuitton. The monthly rent of the relatively new building around is more than 5,000 yuan-for example, the monthly rent of 50 square meters of pavement next to Rongheng Times is about 7,000 yuan, and this building has a more beautiful transparent viewing elevator. Not to mention the street shops that rent tens of thousands of dollars downstairs are rented by chain brands with more budgets. However, the traffic of Guanyin Bridge is considerable-unlike many tourists in Jie Fangbei, Guanyin Bridge has a high proportion of locals and a relatively stable passenger flow; Different from Shapingba, where college students gather, Guanyin Bridge has more diverse consumer groups, ranging from local junior high school students to office workers who come to Chongqing from other places.

Hongding International used the flow of people in CBD to give preferential tickets to those who want to open a shop. Building A of Hongding International is mainly a large apartment with a monthly rent of only 5,000-6,000 yuan, while the monthly rent of a small apartment of about 40 square meters in Building C is only about 2,000 yuan. Zhang Xue's wedding dress shop is about 80 square meters, and the rent is only 5,000 yuan a month; This is the most cost-effective place she found in Guanyin Bridge in the preparatory stage of opening a store.

This makes more and more small business entrepreneurs enter the crowded Hongding International Building, and strive to make a living through the dim elevator signs, public comments and other online publicity methods.

Similarly, cash-strapped young people can find ways to spend a whole day in Hongding International within 150 yuan. At noon, you can buy a set meal for two in the private restaurant of Hongding International, and the average price is only 100 yuan. In the afternoon, you can buy the lowest 20 yuan set meal and sit in a cat coffee, dog coffee or afternoon tea shop where you can take pictures. In the evening, Hongding International is even more lively-you can join the crowd who come to the board game shop here for the night, and young couples can also book a theme room in a private cinema for one night, which is lower than the surrounding hotel chains.

If Shanghai's urban vitality lies in the branches and alleys behind the business circle-shoe repair shops, laundries or mini-fine coffee are opened here, they, like capillaries, constitute a naturally growing business form behind the hustle and bustle of the city; Then in Chongqing, its capillaries are like Hongding International, connecting vertical buildings like fortresses with elevators.

However, these urban mazes in Chongqing are different from the exquisiteness of Shanghai culture. Some people say that the inclusiveness of Sichuan and Chongqing is closely related to the influence of Taoist culture here, which makes the residents in Sichuan and Chongqing warm-hearted and not eager for quick success and instant benefit. In Taoist words, it means "everything goes with the flow", and in Chongqing dialect, it means "it's none of my business if others want to fuck".

The inclusiveness of Hongding International allows different small enterprises to have a place in the building, and also allows the subculture of the city to grow in a low-key way here.

A while ago, Taiwan Province writer Liao Xinzhong's Fantasy Travel Notes of Chongqing Magic Cabin Hongding International for Six Days and Five Nights was released. The article said, "In Hongding International, if you turn a corner in the corridor, you will meet a lively and lovely magical girl; I often meet Hanfu fans looking for organizations and bow to each other in front of the elevator. "

Indeed, kimono-themed cat bars, Hanfu-themed cat bars and so on. It probably meets the needs of consumers who change clothes, and there are more shops with narrower service circles. Hiding behind small security doors on different floors, they opened the doors and found some unique things, such as a bar called "Here comes the cabinet", or a massage shop called sadistic SPA, and small businesses that didn't even have names in public comments.

Once a single man came to Huang Yingrou's high-altitude afternoon tea shop, which was the first time since its opening. The only people who used to visit this store were the delivery man and the boy who accompanied his girlfriend.

This young man in his twenties, in her words, is "very simple", but the man ordered afternoon tea and walked into a white room decorated with an exquisite big bed-feather lamp, crystal crown, soft pillow and pink robe. This not-so-fashionable man took a bunch of templates of photos of trendy men and asked the shopkeeper to take pictures of him.

"We tried to help him shoot, but we couldn't get the feeling of hipster," Huang Yingrou said. "But I took dozens of photos for him, and he was quite satisfied, so I was relieved."

In "chungking mansions", Michael Gordon wrote Nathan's chungking mansions as "the representative of low-end internationalization, the edge of the world center". Businessmen from Africa, Central Asia and Southeast Asia have left their homes to look for gold. Frustrated white addicts have long lived in cheap hotels here, and international asylum seekers have also taken refuge here. Tourists, businessmen, sex workers, temporary workers and people of different religions live here, which makes chungking mansions a conflict zone full of conflicts but full of vitality.

Hongding International is the chungking mansions of Chongqing. It is also a contradiction between conflict and integration: here, people of different formats and business forms come and go, and each has its own small rivers and lakes.

Some shops will make you feel out of date: some private restaurants seem to blend all the outdated elements of online celebrities-there are fake cherry trees in Japanese restaurants at the cashier bar, but the tableware is a common Chinese enamel cup in Nanluoguxiang, and the mural of "workers have power" hangs on the wall, which seems to have no door; Some shops are very popular in Tik Tok, Aooutlets and Xiaohongshu, such as Zhang Xue and Huang Yingrou's afternoon tea shop. Even on weekdays, there are uninterrupted passengers, and even little red books are seen coming from other places.

Owners will also visit each other: in the off-season, the owner of the afternoon tea shop will go to the board game bar downstairs to play mahjong; The staff of the nail salon occasionally go to the private kitchen next door for dinner.

More often, they just regard each other as passers-by, because no one knows how long they can stay here-the low start-up cost of Hongding International also means that many shops are highly reproducible and there are many visitors, so it is difficult for you to stay.

"It has been more than three years since I opened a wedding experience photo studio here," Zhang said. "We opened a wedding experience studio in Chongqing earlier, and it just opened in May. Now there are some similar stores opening in other places."

Huang Yingrou recently bought a lot of new Halloween-themed decorations on Taobao, and plans to redecorate the store in the off-season when the school starts in September. Although her high-altitude afternoon tea shop is popular, its return rate is not high, so it is necessary to change the theme to make young girls willing to take pictures. The young man who runs a cat cafe in Block C keeps a dozen cats, but there are four or five similar shops on the same floor. Their business is more of a regular customer-friends bring their own cats to play.

How many of them want to go out-leave the dark elevator room and the crowded pattern of four ladders and twelve households, and leave the noisy and messy patio.

A private restaurant "Wandering Map" on the 43rd floor is still successful. They have been here for more than four years and have opened three stores on the same floor. They also opened a noodle restaurant in the nearby snack street, Chongqing Ninth Street, which is no longer a small pavement in the building.