(Source: CGTN)

As modernization advances, some traditions hang on. In Southwest China’s metropolis Chongqing, people still more or less rely on freelance porters to carry goods from door to door, but, for how much longer?

Yu Xinquang is a skinny man in his late 50s. But he likes to brag about his strength...
That's how he makes a living, or at least tries...

Itinerant porters like Yu are nicknamed bang bang, after the bamboo stick that has become the symbol of their trade...

Chongqing was once teeming with them...

The city grew from trade up and down the Yangtze River...

There's hardly a commodity which hasn't, at one point or another, dangled at either end of a bang bang stick...

They had their heyday.

Chongqing is known as China's “mountain city”, with a labyrinth of steep slopes and staircases connecting the hillside streets. 

Man has, for a long time, been the most reliable and suitable transporters of goods here... 

You'd never become a millionaire -- a meagre dollar or two for each assignment...

But the bang bangs are quite nostalgic when they think back...

Nearby, couriers whizz by on their motorcycles delivering packages here and there: a new generation of migrant, younger and more educated...

Not far from where they await work is Chongqing’s iconic Liberation Square.

Occasionally a bang bang passes by, seemingly out of place with the modern shopping malls and foreign luxury brands.

They no longer belong here. Tao Yuan, CGTN, Chongqing.