I should have downloaded DiDi Maps before I landed in Chongqing. I knew this in the abstract, the way you know you should back up your phone before an update. I did not do it. I landed at Jiangbei Airport at 9:40pm on a Tuesday with Google Maps open and the quiet confidence of a person who has navigated foreign cities before. By 11:15pm I was standing on an overpass above an eight-lane road, with no idea which side of the river my hotel was on, and a phone whose map showed me as a blue dot in the middle of a featureless gray rectangle.
This is the story of how DiDi Maps — the in-app navigation system inside the DiDi ride-hailing app that most travelers download just to call taxis — became the only thing that got me through four days in Chongqing. I had not planned to use it for navigation. I had not even known it could navigate. I was wrong about both things, and a few others.
The Problem With Google Maps in Chongqing
Google Maps works inside China if you have a VPN. I had a VPN. The VPN was working. The map loaded. The blue dot was correct. What was not correct was everything else.
Chongqing is a vertical city. Streets overlap. Pedestrian walkways go over highways, under highways, through buildings, and occasionally into the sides of hills. Google Maps, even when loaded, does not understand verticality. It kept telling me my hotel was 400 meters away, walking distance, and it was — horizontally. Vertically it was 14 floors down, through an elevator in a shopping mall that closed at 10pm.
I stood on the overpass for ten minutes. Three different Chinese-made phones walked past me, each with their owners staring at screens, navigating confidently. None of them were using Google Maps. They were using Baidu Maps, Amap (Gaode), or — most commonly — DiDi.
The DiDi in-app map I had not noticed
I had DiDi installed because every Western travel guide says to install it. DiDi is the Chinese Uber equivalent, the ride-hailing app that works in English and accepts foreign credit cards. I had used it twice from the airport. What I had not noticed was that the map inside DiDi — the one that shows you where your driver is — was a full navigation system. Not a simplified version. A full one, with walking directions, transit directions, and the kind of vertical-aware routing that Chongqing demands.
I opened DiDi. I tapped the map icon at the bottom. The map that loaded was different from Google’s. It showed the overpass I was standing on. It showed the elevator entrance inside the shopping mall. It showed my hotel, fourteen floors below me, with a walking route that went through the mall’s parking garage and out a side exit I would never have found on my own.
I walked it. It took eleven minutes. The mall parking garage was dim and smelled like concrete, but it worked.
The Four Days That Followed
I used DiDi Maps for everything for the next four days. Walking directions. Transit directions. The occasional DiDi ride when the walking was too much. Here is what worked, what did not, and what surprised me.
What worked
- Vertical routing in Chongqing. This is the killer feature for any city with multi-level infrastructure. DiDi Maps knows about elevators inside buildings, pedestrian tunnels through hills, and the connections between subway stations and shopping malls. Google Maps does not
- Walking directions in old neighborhoods. The hutong-style alleys in Yuzhong district, where Google Maps shows a blank white space, DiDi Maps shows actual paths with names
- Real-time transit. Bus arrival times were accurate to within 2 minutes. Subway entrances were correctly mapped, including the ones inside buildings
- DiDi ride integration. When walking was too far, the “call a DiDi” button was right there in the same interface. No app-switching
What did not work
- English coverage is partial. Street names and POI names are in Chinese characters only. If you cannot read any Chinese, you will be guessing. DiDi’s ride-hailing side has English; the maps side does not
- Search is finicky. Searching for “Hongyadong” in English returned nothing. Searching for “洪崖洞” returned the right place immediately. You need to know the Chinese name or paste it from somewhere
- Outside major cities, coverage thins. I tested it briefly in a smaller town later in the trip and the map was noticeably less detailed than in Chongqing
What surprised me
The offline capability. Once you’ve loaded an area on DiDi Maps while online, it caches aggressively. I lost cell signal for twenty minutes in a tunnel between Liziba and Eling Park and the navigation kept working — not the live bus times, but the map itself and my position on it. Google Maps in China without cell signal is a paperweight.
The Driver Who Could Not Find Me
On day three I called a DiDi to take me to a hotpot place in Nan’an district, across the river. The driver called me. I do not speak Mandarin well enough for phone calls. He spoke no English. We were both, briefly, stuck.
The DiDi app has a feature I had not noticed: a “send location pin to driver” button. I tapped it. My exact location — including the description “north side of the overpass, near the elevator entrance” in Chinese, which the app generated automatically from the map data — appeared on the driver’s screen. He found me in three minutes.
This is the moment I stopped thinking of DiDi as “the Chinese Uber” and started thinking of it as the navigation system that also calls cars. The maps and the ride-hailing are the same product. The map’s vertical-aware data is what makes the ride-hailing actually work in a city like Chongqing, where “200 meters away” can mean “200 meters away and twelve floors up.”
What I’d Tell Anyone Going to Chongqing
Download DiDi before you land. Open it at the airport. Tap the map icon at the bottom of the screen and let it load the city while you still have airport wifi. The in-app map is the navigation system you actually want.
If you can read even a little Chinese — even just enough to recognize characters for “exit,” “entrance,” “north,” and “south” — DiDi Maps will get you anywhere in Chongqing. If you cannot read any Chinese, it will still get you most places, but you will need to paste destination names in Chinese from your hotel booking or a translation app.
Google Maps is fine for the parts of China that are flat. Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu — Google’s maps are accurate enough for these, with a VPN. Chongqing is not flat. The parts of China that are vertical, layered, or built into hillsides — Chongqing, Hong Kong (technically separate but similar geography), parts of Guiyang — these are where Google’s flat-map assumptions break and DiDi’s vertical-aware data is the difference between finding your hotel and standing on an overpass at 11:15pm wondering which way is down.
Leaving Chongqing
I left on day five, on a high-speed train to Chengdu. The DiDi ride to the station was uneventful — the driver knew where the station was, the app knew where the driver was, and I watched the route on the in-app map as we wound through the morning traffic. The map showed the elevation dropping as we descended from Yuzhong toward the river, then climbing again as we crossed the bridge into the station district. Fourteen floors of vertical change, displayed as a thin line on a phone screen.
At the station I uninstalled Google Maps. Not out of anger — out of recognizing that for the rest of my time in China, in any city with more than one level, it was not the tool I needed. I kept DiDi. I used it for the next three weeks, in Chengdu, Xi’an, and a smaller town in Guizhou. It worked in all of them. In the smaller town it was less detailed, but still better than the alternative.
The hotel in Chongqing, by the way, was fine. The room was on the fourteenth floor of a building whose entrance was at street level on one side and at the bottom of a cliff on the other. The front desk woman, when I finally arrived at 11:37pm, looked at me with the specific expression of someone who has watched a foreigner walk in lost at 11:37pm before. She said, in slow English: “Next time, use DiDi.”
I already had.
DiDi Maps in China: Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is DiDi Maps in China?
DiDi Maps is the in-app navigation system inside the DiDi ride-hailing app. Most travelers download DiDi just to call taxis, but the map feature is a full navigation system with walking directions, transit directions, and vertical-aware routing that handles multi-level infrastructure in cities like Chongqing.
Q: Does DiDi Maps work in English?
Partially. The ride-hailing interface works in English. The in-app map navigation is Chinese-only. If you cannot read Chinese, paste destination names in Chinese from your hotel booking or translation app. Searching ‘Hongyadong’ returns nothing; searching ‘洪崖洞’ works immediately.
Q: DiDi Maps vs Google Maps in China – which is better?
DiDi Maps for vertical cities (Chongqing, Hong Kong, Guiyang). Google Maps for flat cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu) with a VPN. Google Maps does not understand verticality – it tells you a destination is 400 meters away when it is 400 meters horizontal and 14 floors vertical.
Q: Can I use DiDi Maps offline in China?
Yes, with limitations. Once loaded online, it caches aggressively. Live bus times require signal, but the map and your position continue offline. Google Maps in China without cell signal is essentially a paperweight.
Q: Does DiDi Maps work for walking directions?
Yes – in vertical cities it is the only tool that reliably works. DiDi Maps knows about elevators inside buildings, pedestrian tunnels, and subway-to-mall connections. Real-time transit accurate to within 2 minutes in major cities.
Photos courtesy of Unsplash.
