The 10 Biggest Cities You've Never Heard Of (Probably)

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Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Standard Studios.
Select images and video from Getty Images.
Black Lives Matter.

[vianabdullah]

The entire list could probably be filled with Chinese and Indian cities alone.

Also, Nanjing is quite well-known for unfortunate reasons related to WWII.

[stevenkyle]

Fun fact :The subway system in Xi'an went extremely slow and difficult since Xi'an has been the capital city for 13 ancient dynasties. For every kilometer you go underground you may accidentally encounter an archeological site with hundreds or even thousands of years' history. There is a joke saying that the busiest people for Xi'an subway construction are not engineers but archaeologists.

[ThimZ]

Idk how many people have heard have heard of Nanjing, but a lot have probably heard of Nanking (most likely because of what the Japanese did there and the Opium Wars); those are the exact same place, just written differently (as you may have guessed)

[Kyzix]

It's weird clicking on this video and seeing my own city, but considering Nagoya is famous within Japan for being skipped over and ignored despite its large population and historical significance, it makes sense. Here are a few more interesting facts about Nagoya: Nagoya has the annual World Cosplay Summit, Nagoya Station has the tallest railway-station building in the world, Nagoya Station is also one of the oldest in Japan opening in 1886, the Nagoya area also contains the largest Brazilian population in Japan (mostly because of Toyota), and while Japan is more known for things like fish, Nagoya is the chicken capital of Japan with its own style of chicken wings famous all over the country.

[Gamarabi]

Fun fact - Chongqing and Chengdu have a major rivalry that has existed since at least the Qing Dynasty

For context, Chongqing is like taking metro Chicago with the terrain of Pittsburg. It has a lot of good universities and is a very industrial city.

Chengdu is a very electronics heavy, somewhat counterculture city that’s often gets in trouble for “ignoring” Beijing. Like a supersized Seattle. Unsurprisingly, an American consulate is located on the city.

[arshadrehman]

I would have thought Shenzen was a well known city, especially due to its huge number of tech manufacturing🤔

[jasonfleischer]

It’s funny because if this video was made in 2019 then Wuhan would have been on the list.

[eunbigolden]

timestamps:
10 | Xi'an, China 1:33
9 | Luanda, Angola 2:37
8 | Nanjing, China 3:31
7 | Chengdu, China 4:33
6 | Nagoya, Japan 5:54
5 | Chennai, India 7:23
4 | Shenzhen, China 8:30
3 | Guangzhou, China 10:09
2 | Tianjin, China 11:35
1 | Chongqing, China 0:20 12:47

[jhas]

I lived in Chengdu in 2016/2017, and visited Chongqing on two occasions.

I found the duality of the two so intriguing. They're connected by high-speed rail and despite being roughly the same distance apart as Montreal and Toronto, the trip takes only an hour and 45 minutes, and cost roughly $20CAD.

Chengdu is pan-flat and sits at the bottom of the Sichuan basin, but is only about a 1-hour drive away from the foot of the Sichuan mountains, the highest range east of the Himalayas with Mt. Siguniang standing at over 6000m. On a clear day (pretty much only ever after summer rain) you could see the snowy peaks from the city. But most days are humid, cloudy and windless. Not to mention the air pollution. The only way to describe a midsummer day in Chengdu is "heavy".

Converseley, Chongqing is at the eastern edge of the basin, and at the confluence of the mighty Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The second time I was there, the water was so low, that you could walk down into the riverbed, where locals would have picnics and fish. On the legs of the bridge, the high water mark was visible about 20m higher up. Rising dramatically from the river is the mountainous topography that the rest of the city is built on/into. It's easily the most dynamic city I've ever been to and to me, is a unique place in the world. Built into the caves in one of the riverside cliffs, is a nightlife area full of bars and restaurants, called the hongya caves, which I believe inspired the architecture seen in the anime film Spirited Away. Aside from the monorail and bus systems, their transit network also features cable cars that traverse the rivers, but serve more as tourist attractions these days, considering the insane lineups you have to wait in to ride them. It also features from what I remember, the world's longest escalator, which you can access with the same card as the metro.

During the Sino-Japanese War/WW2, the KMT moved their capital to Chongqing, where they built a network of tunnels/caves/bunkers into the mountains where they could take refuge from bombings. Today, the networks are still part of the city, and many of these underground spaces serve as social spaces - probably most often and famously, as hot pot restaurants.

Much like Chengdu, the climate is extremely humid, and somehow even hotter. It's known as one of the 3 furnaces of the Yangtze River valley along with Wuhan (which probably would have also been in this video if it weren't for the pandemic) and Nanjing. The two cities also spar over who makes better hot pot.

Otherwise, the character of the cities couldn't be more different. Like the flatness of Chengdu, the locals are laid back, indulge in the very Sichuanese art of public napping and spending all day playing majiang and drinking tea. It's often said that Chengdunese fight with their mouths, and Chongqingers fight with their fists. And I find this apt, as the whole city of Chongqing feels much more brutal. It's more of a fast-paced, rabble-rousing city and it's felt in the people and the dynamism of its landscape and architecture. As someone else in the comments likened it to Chicago, I'll agree wholeheartedly. In what those cities lack in notoriety, being behind others like Beijing, Shanghai, New York, LA, etc., they make up for in character and uniqueness. They're cities with a ton of soul.

[ticron]

Chongqing is a really cool place. You're right, it is incredibly hilly, but it's still dense. So a building might have a "ground floor" on the 1st floor and the 20th. But a big part of the population is that despite being classified as one "city", it's the size of Austria. If you only counted the built up area, it would be much lower on the list.

[TheScourge]

This is cool and I think non-Western cities in general don't get talked about enough in urbanist circles. On the one hand I do get there's language barrier issues, differences in economic level of development, and differences in political structure. But cities outside North America/Western Europe do some neat things and no cities match the public transit that East Asian cities have except maybe Moscow. Everybody loves Dutch cities of course but there's good and interesting things, as well as familiar challenges, in parts of the world that most anglo-phone folks don't think much about!

[dmike]

I took lots of Asian history classes in college, so I knew most of the Asian cities. Very surprised you didn't know about Xi'an. It was the original capitol & cultural heartland of China, until they decided to move it to Beijing in the Ming Dynasty.

[saipranav]

Chennaite here. Surprised you didn't talk about the metro system here. The city is undergoing a major metro rail network overhaul. 2 lines are already opened and operational since a few years, and 1 more line is under construction. Two more lines have been identified with all tests and studies done and are about to begin construction. Altogether spanning all across the city. The city also has a large bus transit network, covering all corners of the city and outside too.

[juanpedronardin]

China and India are an universe inself, each one is their own "Americas" in terms of population. Imagine New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Lima and Bogota in the same country, same flag, sometimes even the same region, and only one of them is the capital.

[xdavid]

To add some more trivia: Nanjing was the capital of many Chinese dynasties and regimes (it was last the capital under the ROC). Nan-Jing literally means "southern capital, " while Bei-Jing means "northern capital" (incidentally Tokyo means "eastern capital").
Nanjing was also known (minorly) for naturally colorful river rocks (Yuhua stones), but that's pretty much gone by now.

[gars]

Puebla is similar in size to Denver and Santo Domingo, and is not some small provincial hub close to Mexico City. And its not some unplanned mess, its a pretty meaty, grand and urban city. La Plata in Argentina is another classic example. Brazil had too many cities like this, it's not just Rio, Sao and the "provinces".

[丁俊中]

Language barrier do exists. As a Chinese, Those East Asian cities in this video, no matter Nagoya, Chongqing, Nanjing and more, is very familiar to me. Many of them were famous big cities since thousands years ago.

[NadikaNadja]

Shall do the stereotypical Chennai person online thing and point out, tiny bit unfair on the description for Chennai. Glossed over its history but, at least from a perspective, it deserves more. Great commuter train network, incredibly well connected bus system, two existing lines and three under construction metro lines being built, plus some focus on building a more sustainable, car-free city

[lipschitzlyapunov]

How can you know Ahmedabad but not Shenzhen, Chongqing, Nanjing, Xi'an, and Chennai? Shenzhen, Nanjing, and Xi'an are especially recognizable

[Default]

Talking about the population of Chinese cities is kinda tricky because "cities" in China are extremely large jurisdictions with municipal boundaries spreading far beyond their metro areas (in China, counties are subordinate to cities, and "cities" can cover thousands of square miles of area). Chongqing, in particular, is probably the biggest exemplar of this issue. It is a "directly administered municipality", which puts it equivalent to a province in administrative hierarchy and covers an area larger than Austria, but a large portion of its some 33, 000, 000 residents live in far-flung rural areas of the "city".

Also, Chengdu is generally considered to be in southwestern China, not central (which would be where Wuhan is).