How China’s hi-tech AI food-delivery apps are no match for Chongqing’s ‘graceful disorder’

Food delivery couriers in Chongqing rely on their own topographical knowledge to deliver their orders. — SCMP

Chongqing, an industrial city and leading river port on the upper Yangtze River basin in southwestern China, is known for its mouth-numbing food, suffocating summers, and for soaring starchitect-designed skyscrapers planted alongside high-rises in what a popular travel guide describes as “graceful disorder”.

It is also one of the few places in China that food-delivery men do not refer to their smartphone apps for navigation aid, relying instead on their own topographical knowledge to complete their deliveries.