Who’s trending on Instagram? A Chongqing tour guide

In an age when anybody can be somebody on the internet, you’ve got to find your niche. Maybe you’re the GRWM girl who dresses only in check or you ambush couples on the street to ask how they met. For He Yu, a tour guide who goes by the name Hugh, it’s the Chinese city of Chongqing, in Sichuan province, and the quirks concealed above (and below) the cement.

Today his account, @hughchongqing, has ticked up to 127k followers, clocking upwards of 10 million views on Reels, after just shy of a year on Instagram. So what’s his deal? Let’s dig into it.

He leans in hard to surrealist Chongqing

“Why is going to work in Chongqing so hard?” Hugh asks rhetorically. The camera cuts to a sky-high elevated road. “At first I was trying to catch a bus, but how do I get up there?”

Hugh shows the M.C. Escher-like surrealism of Chongqing. He can’t get the bus, so he goes to the subway. He spends 10 minutes on escalators. “Bro catching subway from Earth’s core,” says one commenter. He tries driving. “If I end up in the wrong lane, it’s going to be a day trip,” Hugh says as the city’s maze of roads flashes by.

He maps out labyrinth-like daily commutes and films hyperspeed takes of the 100-metre ascent required to reach public toilets, showing the most wild and perplexing bits of Chongqing infrastructure.

“It’s not a gentle or relaxing place,” he writes to me over Instagram, “but it’s fascinating and full of character.” A tram that crosses the river, lifts that take you to underground roads, buses running on 72-metre-high overpasses, and never-ending escalators being but a few of the transport methods.

He’s serving everything with humour

Hugh’s astute explainers on the idiosyncrasies of daily life in China – such as the downfalls of WeChat translation – are comedy gold. He films nonchalantly in unlikely surroundings – say, knee-deep in a flooded street playing mahjong. Plus, an achingly catchy “Chongqing Theme Song” overdub has become his calling card.

How he got here