The eastern edge of Fuling: Jiaoshi and its sixteen units

Fuling District runs 74.5 kilometres from west to east and 70.8 kilometres from north to south, between 29°21' and 30°01' north and 106°56' and 107°43' east. Its bounds are written in the district record by naming four extreme points, and the easternmost of them, Baijibao, lies in Jiaoshi. The others are the westernmost at Dachayuan in Zengfu, the southernmost at Jinjiadian in Tongle and the northernmost at Hongqiangyuan in Zhenxi. A township that holds one corner of a district this size is a useful place to stand and measure the rest of it from.

Jiaoshi is a township-level administrative unit, one of the towns under Fuling District. Its administered list runs to sixteen names: two communities, the central and Yuelai, and fourteen villages, among them Xinjing, Nanmu, Yongfeng, Banli, Wayao, Daxi, Guanghua, Xiangyang, Dongquan, Longshi, Guoping, Tanzhong, Longjing and Bailu. Nothing in the district record describes what is built in them, or how large they are, or who lives there. What it gives instead is the unit itself, which is how a Chinese district of this size is mapped more finely than a town: by community and village name, and nothing more.

For most of its history Fuling was served by Yangtze boats, because ground transport was slow over this terrain. Railways reached the area only in the twenty-first century, the first being the Chongqing-Huaihua line of 2005, with the high-speed Chongqing-Lichuan line following in December 2013 across the Hanjiatuo Bridge. The Yangtze still crosses the district east to west and the Wu runs north to south through it. Jiaoshi sits at the downstream, eastern end of that arrangement, at the point the district record uses to say where Fuling stops, and the ground beyond it belongs to Fengdu.