Small Town, Big Ambition

After traveling on highway and country road for around 6 hours by bus (normally it should take us 3 hours but the heavy rain in Chongqing caused serious traffic jam), we arrived in a small town named Zhu Tuo.

Zhu Tuo, with about eighty thousands inhabitants is built around two parallel main roads only, 20 minutes’ walk at most from one end to another for each of them. One is the old bumpy stone road, with traditional houses made of old brick with tiled roofs. The other is the cement road, developed 3 years ago, along which are standardized newly built 5 storeys apartment buildings with balconies.

You move from one to the other in a few second, feeling like your traveling through times in a Society that suddenly switched from status quo to fast change. Then right on the bypath heading from the old road to the new one, a sign in-between dragged my attention. The sign leads to a 200-meter street with tiled floor. On both sides of the street are stores mainly selling fashionable clothes and daily necessities. On the sign was written ‘Pedestrian Street’.

In a remote town rarely having crowd shopping and vehicles going by, here is a local government suddenly willing to turn the small town into a big city in no time.

This post is courtesy of Melody Zhu