Chongqing - After sundown at the Jialing-Yangtze junction, an 11-story tower of lanterned eaves lights up Chongqing's cliffside. Hongyadong, a shrine of Bayu street fare, has surpassed a billion short-video views and attracts nearly 30 million visitors a year.
He Yongzhi is the creator of Hongyadong and the founder of Cygnet Hotpot. (Photo/Chen Yingzhu)
Behind the spectacle stands He Yongzhi, 72, a restaurateur whose Cygnet hotpot chain once grossed 2 billion yuan (approximately U.S. $278 million) annually after she invented the now-ubiquitous yuanyang divided hotpot. "God gave me nothing but a dream," she says, seated in a wood-carved office that overlooks her creation.
In 2002, when the Chongqing municipal government called for proposals to preserve the city’s last remaining stilt houses, she wasn’t a developer but a Forbes-listed businesswoman. Together with her office manager, she handwrote a plan to save them.
“The tender was written full of the soul of Bayu culture,” she recalled. She divided it into three equal parts: real estate finance, cultural excavation, and commercial operation. “The latter two were precisely my battleground.”
Her proposal outperformed professional firms but nearly bankrupted her. “Hongyadong came into the world on the edge of life and death,” she said, recalling how the Qiansimen Bridge design forced a 42-meter retreat. The chief architect quit, declaring stilt-house modernization impossible, and she searched projects at home and abroad for solutions.
On one inspection, she tumbled in Shanxi Province, smashed her right leg, refused surgery, set it in plaster, and flew back overnight because, as she put it, "If Hongyadong stalled, Cygnet Hotpot would sink with it."
Flat on a hospital bed, she sketched ideas that would rewrite stilt-house engineering. Traditional timber gave way to termite-proof GRC (Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete) composites, allowing the structure to rise from the usual three stories to eleven. Drab tiles were replaced with copper sheets strong enough to hold a modern lighting grid. "Without those copper tiles, there would be no golden Hongyadong," she said.
When the lights first came on in 2006, the project was deep in the red. For five straight years, it ran at a loss, and she mortgaged nearly everything to pay her staff. She even spent two million yuan annually just to keep the façade glowing. “When the lights go out, the soul is scattered,” she told her anxious managers.
Salvation arrived by accident in 2016. A tourist posted a night photo online; the image went viral, and Hongyadong's dormant terraces flooded with visitors. By 2018, fueled by Douyin's (the Chinese version of TikTok) short-video boom, annual footfall had reached 12 million, second only to the Forbidden City. S
Seizing the momentum, He opened her own Douyin account at 65 and has uploaded daily ever since, sometimes decoding Bayu folktales, sometimes livestreaming entrepreneurial advice, occasionally modeling accordion-inspired outfits of her own design.
She knows online fame is fickle. "Internet celebrity is the entrance; long-term fame is the goal," she said. To keep the glow sustainable, she is investing 150 million yuan in an immersive exhibit that promises to reveal whether a secret cave really lies behind Hongyadong's façade.
When pressed on her stamina, she rattles off her daily rhythm: morning workouts and accordion drills, afternoons at the office, evenings spent painting or playing mahjong into the night. "It's not fatigue that ages you," she smiled, "but living without a dream."
Her daughter, Liao Weijia, who now exports Chongqing chili sauce to Western supermarkets, calls her mother an unrealistic optimist. A hotpot seller building a castle on a cliff sounded absurd, she said, "but she always believed 'I can.' That's entrepreneurship."