Chongqing — On a cold December morning, the noise at the foot of Chongqing Yunyang's Dengyun Ladder fades as onlookers drift closer, phones held chest-high, waiting.
A man in a wheelchair rolls to the first step and stops. He leans forward until his shoulders sit above the wheels, hands closing around the metal rims. For a moment, he is still. Then he exhales, drives his arms down and forward, and the chair lifts with him — a quick, controlled hop. A blunt thud lands him on the first step. He steadies, resets his grip, and does it again.
Ahead are 1,200 stone steps — 150 metres of vertical gain — and the only engine he will use is his upper body.
Once a skier and devoted weightlifter, Liu Lijia was left paralysed after a car crash. On a winter morning in Chongqing, he took on a staircase that most people dread, even on two feet. (Photo: Tan Qiyun)
The man is Liu Lijia, 37, from Neijiang in China's south-western Sichuan province. Before a car accident in 2012 left him with a high spinal cord injury, he was a skier and the sort of person who built his days around training: fitness, bodybuilding, weightlifting. Now he is known online for something else — the precise, almost athletic choreography he has taught himself for moving through a world not built for wheels: how to lift a chair up curbs, how to climb steps, how to descend safely, how to keep training when the rest of your body will not obey.
On December 16, he came to Yunyang because the Dengyun Ladder is a dare in physical form — a tourist landmark and a local rite of passage. His followers had suggested it. "They kept telling me to try," he says, smiling at the memory. "So I thought: fine. Let's try."
A sentence that stuck
Liu speaks softly, without theatrics, but he remembers the moment his life tilted towards the kind of challenge now unfolding on the steps in front of him.
Two years after his crash, his family took him to a supermarket in Neijiang. There were a few steps at the entrance. They left him on the flat ground and went inside. Someone said: You stay here. You won't make it up.
"It was like a thorn," Liu says. "A single sentence that stayed in my chest."He pauses, searching for the right word. "It lit me."
At 24, after the accident, his diagnosis had been brutal: multiple shattered vertebrae in the thoracic and lumbar spine, dislocation, and irreversible nerve damage. Surgery stabilised what could be stabilised. The rest was pain and the slow, disorienting realisation that the body he had trained for years no longer belonged to him in the same way.
"There was a time I didn't want to live," he says. "Not dramatic — just… I couldn't see a way forward."Many people with spinal cord injuries describe a grief that comes in waves: for movement, for independence, for dignity in small daily tasks. Liu recognises that landscape. He also recognises the particular loneliness of public space when you cannot enter it.
That supermarket step was small. But it made something in him push back. "Why can't I?" he remembers thinking. "Who decided that?"
Training for a different body
After that, the gym and the park became his second home again — not as places of performance, but as laboratories.
"No one teaches you how to go up steps like this," he says. "You have to translate everything into your hands.”
He watched other wheelchair users, studied his own failures, and practised until his palms split and healed, split and healed again. He trained strength, balance, explosive power — the tiny timing differences between slipping backward and landing square. "Where I was weak, I trained that," he says, as if it were the simplest rule in the world.
By the mid-2010s, his wheelchair skills were strong enough that he was recommended for an athlete selection programme for disabled sports in Shanghai. He chose alpine skiing — a return to the sport he knew before the accident.
In Harbin, where winter can be punishing even for people who can retreat indoors, he trained for long days in temperatures far below zero. "More than 10 hours sometimes," he says. In 2019, he won the men's slalom at a world para alpine skiing event in the Netherlands, standing atop the podium.
Later, he pivoted again — to bodybuilding, a sport that, for many disabled competitors, is as much about claiming space as it is about muscle. Over several years, he won six consecutive national titles in China's disabled bodybuilding competitions.
None of this, he insists, is a story of becoming "superhuman". It is a story of deciding that the world's boundaries are not the same thing as his own. "I just trained," he says. "And I kept going outside.”
The ascent: arms against gravity
On the Dengyun Ladder, the physics is unforgiving. Liu's wheelchair weighs about 15 kilograms. He weighs about 55. Every step is a lift of the combined mass, powered by two arms that must do three jobs at once: propel, stabilise, and prevent the chair from tipping.
His technique looks almost like a repeated punctuation mark: lean, grip, explode, land. Sometimes he braces with his right hand against the stone, then uses his left to lift the chair, keeping the balance point tight beneath him. "It's like drawing a bow," he says. "Three points in one line."If one hand is late by a fraction, the chair drifts, balance goes, and the risk of a fall spikes.
People watching wince at the sound — the chair striking stone again and again — but Liu rarely looks up. He counts in his head, breath measured, shoulders working like pistons. The skin across his hands is thickened from years of training; the veins on his forearms stand out like a relief map.
He is careful with water. Too much, he explains, makes him feel bloated and reduces his power. He wets his mouth, swallows only enough to keep going.
Once a skier and devoted weightlifter, Liu Lijia was left paralysed after a car crash. On a winter morning in Chongqing, he took on a staircase that most people dread, even on two feet. (Photo: Tan Qiyun)
As the climb wears on, the atmosphere changes. There is less chatter. A few strangers call encouragement. Someone says his name as if they already know him. Many do — he livestreams these challenges, and his videos circulate widely among wheelchair users and their families. His comments sections are full of practical questions: How do you keep your shoulders safe? What do you do about pressure sores? How do you train your core if you can't feel it? Liu answers, often in painstaking detail.
"People want the method," he says. "Not just the story."
The final steps: where will takes over
Near the top, the staircase narrows, and the slope feels steeper. The final three steps are the hardest, he says — not because they are different, but because the body has begun to empty.
"My hands go numb," he says later. "No feeling. At that point, it's only will."
At 12.20 pm — nearly three hours after he started — he reaches the summit. His clothes are soaked through. His right arm shakes, uncontrollably, as if it is still climbing even now. But he is grinning, and the grin looks less like triumph than relief: a private agreement kept.
Once a skier and devoted weightlifter, Liu Lijia was left paralysed after a car crash. On a winter morning in Chongqing, he arrived at the top of the Dengyun Ladder. (Photo: Tan Qiyun)
He sits for a moment, breathing hard, and looks back down the long line of steps he has just climbed. The crowd begins to loosen. A few people step forward to congratulate him. Cameras come close. Liu nods, thanks them, and rubs his hands as if waking them back to life.
"I know people like me who won't go out at all," he says after a while. "They think every trip outside is trouble — for themselves, for their families, for strangers. So they stay at home." He does not judge this, he adds quickly. "I understand that feeling very well."
For Liu, the shift came when he realised that isolation was also a kind of risk. "If you don't go out, the road never appears," he says. "You can't see it, you can't learn it. You can't change it."
That belief now shapes much of what he does. Over the past few years, Liu has turned his training routines and hard-won experience into online videos: how to climb slopes and curbs safely in a wheelchair; how to train the shoulders and core without overloading them; how to reduce the risk of secondary complications that come with long-term paralysis. His tone is practical, unadorned, and patient. The optimism, when it appears, is earned.
The livestream of his Dengyun Ladder climb drew more than 10,000 viewers. Liu imagines some of them watching from hospital beds, newly injured, or from bedrooms they have barely left since coming home. He is careful not to promise transformation. "I don't say everyone should do this," he says, gesturing back toward the steps. "But I want people to see that movement is possible. That the world doesn't end at the door."
After the climb, he speaks about his next idea with the same measured curiosity: attempting China's Five Great Mountains, one by one. He does not frame it as a conquest. "I don't know if I can do it," he says. "But if I don't try, then it's impossible by default."
Eventually, Liu turns his wheelchair toward the accessible path that winds down the hillside. The descent is quiet, almost anticlimactic, and he blends gradually into the flow of tourists moving in the opposite direction. There are no announcements, no closing gestures.
His life, like his climb, does not move in leaps of symbolism. It moves step by step — by arms, by wheels, by an insistence on going outside — continuing forward, and upward, into ordinary space.