@chjara my understanding is that basically, sichuan had two 20m+ person cities in it plus all of the 100m (?) surroundings, and that's too many people to administer in one province, so they broke off chongqing and its surroundings into its own province. since it's a provincial level city that also administers its surroundings, the urban area itself is actually much smaller, it includes lots of rural area too