The four flights of stairs the national weightlifting champion Li Bin climbed before he reached the final stage to light the cauldron to end the torch relay reminded me of a faded photo about the city taken in the 1960s.

It is a photo featuring a long flight of stone stairs in front of the Chaotianmen Port, known as the starting point for the centuries-old city set in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, which has long been an economic hub of western China.

Such a terrain explains why Chongqing, the most populous municipality in the world as home to 32 million people, has the least ownership of bicycles, yet the most number of porters who bear the city's weights on their shoulders.

Better known as the bangbang army, they are about Chongqing's most distinctive and traditional population. Arriving from the countryside with no skills and minimal education, they pick up the cheapest of tools - a bamboo pole (or bangbang) and some rope - and hang around the docks, the markets and the bus stations waiting for goods to carry up the steep slopes of this mountain port.

It is surprising to find that such realization can have revealed such a lively aspect about the city, which is most of the time associated with hotpot, beauties and more recently, a night view comparable to that of Hong Kong.

As I was on the way to the Chaotianmen Port, the sight of the bangbang army was almost ubiquitous.

The stone stairs have long gone and are now replaced with a modern plaza complete with an as impressive fleet of concrete stairs.

But the bangbang army is still there. Bare armed and almost in their middle age, they were carrying newly arrived cases of TV sets upon their tanned shoulders and strong muscles.

"People in such a city can't do without bangbang like us," said one of them surnamed Xu from Dianjiang, Sichuan.

"Bangbang is in fact an easy profession to handle as long as you have enough strength," said He, a 50-year-old from Guang'an, Sichuan province.

Since the torch was having its relay in the city, he and some fellow porters took the morning off to watch it live on TV.

"But it doesn't really matter, as long as I saw it and knew that it was in the city," he said.