Hongyancun – the world’s deepest subway station that will clog up your ears!

2 min read

2 years ago Robin

红岩村站, Hongyancun subway station, located on Chongqing Metro Lines 5 and 9, between Jingwei Avenue and Shabin Road, in Chongqing’s Yuzhong District, China is 116 meters (381 ft) below the ground, and the difference in air pressure will often leave users with clogged ears when accessed via its elevator!
The Chinese metropolis is famous for its hilly landscape, with roads winding up and down and slopes dotted with houses and buildings, and it was this particularity that led to the creation of the deepest subway in China….and the whole world!

Located on the south bank of the Jialingjiang River near the Hualong Bridge out of Chongqing suburb, Hongyan Village lies atop one of the many hills in the Chinese municipality, so workers had to deep extremely deep to connect the new station to the city’s subway lines.
It reportedly took people 38 minutes to climb from the bottom of the station to the surface and allegedly felt like climbing a mountain every day.
And the station was completed in 2022, after as many as 400 days of hard work.

Either way, because of its extreme depth, Hongyancun Station quickly became somewhat of a tourist attraction in Chongqing, with videos of people visiting the city just to descend to the bottom of Hongyancun Station, using either eight large escalators or the modern elevator, that reportedly leaves people with clogged ears because of the steep decline.
Interestingly, it takes 53 seconds to reach the bottom of Hongyancun Station via the elevator, and over 10 minutes via the escalators.

Before Hongyancun Station was inaugurated, the title of the world’s deepest subway station belonged to the Arsenalna (Арсенальна) station of the Kyiv Metro, Ukraine (in photo below).
The station remains the second-deepest one in the world at 105.5 metres (346 ft), after Hongyancun station of the Chongqing Metro.
The depth is attributed to the geography of Kyiv, whose high bank of the Dnipro River rises above the rest of the city.