Qingcheng City and the Rivermag Line

Qingcheng City, a harbor city in 2065. The character cheng means the open ground in front of a temple—the name of this city carries the smell of incense in it.

It is a city with two eras laid one on top of the other. Maglev trains and holographic advertising stand on the new fill; the old quarter still keeps its oil-burning temples, its crooked lanes, the old river channel cut in the Qing dynasty. That river silted up first, then was filled in section by section, houses built over it, street numbers assigned; after the Rivermag Line opened, the works wrapped the old embankment in a shell of metal, and the smell of that river has in theory been sealed away for 50 years. Except that a few stretches of the embankment were never fully covered and are still exposed, and walking past them you can smell wet earth, especially in the small hours.

The Rivermag Line was built along that old embankment—15 stations end to end. The maglev cars slide over the rails set into the tunnel and cut the people standing there into bands of horizontal light. In the underground sections there is a cold-blue sensor light every 10 meters. Shuyuan Station is the downtown interchange, its structure reaching 3 levels down, close to the municipal library and the cram-school street; the platform numbers only go up to three. South of it are Qingcaohe Station and Miaoqianpu Station, two small stops where the last express does not stop at all.

In the old quarter the place names outlive the things they point at. The station sign still carries the name of the river; the river is underneath it. Nanyang, Shuyuan Street, the old river embankment—every one of them points at something that changed shape long ago. The lanes of the Old River District are narrow, lined on both sides with three-story houses of brick red, and some of the arcades are so low you have to duck to walk through.

The street by day and the street by night are not used by the same people either. Early in the morning the smell of frying egg drifts out of the lane mouth; at noon the noodle stall opens; a cart selling iced black tea parks at the corner. At the south end of Shuyuan Street a few stands sell red tortoise cakes in the daytime, and after dark the whole stretch is empty. On the corner there is a 24-hour convenience store with a sticker on the glass door that reads "Night shift on duty," and beside it another that reads "Day shift also open"; the handwriting on the two is years apart in age—one door, two schedules.

By day, Qingcheng is a high-efficiency city of the future. But once a certain hour has passed, the old temples, the old trees, the old wells and the nameless lane mouths light up, one after another, the other side of themselves that they keep hidden in daylight.