The line to the lake: Bishan's rubber-tyred train

Bishan lies 23 kilometres west of Chenjiaping on the western approach to Chongqing, and it covers 915 square kilometres. Its recorded history runs past 2,000 years: a county was established in 757 under Yuzhou, named after Chongbi Mountain, and it stayed a county until 2014, when it became a district. The climate is mild and wet, with an annual average of 18.3 degrees and 1,231.2 millimetres of rain, and a maximum of 43.8 degrees recorded on 20 August 2022. Xiuhu Park is the water and green space of the new town that has grown around the district's new connections.

The line that made the new town reachable is unusual. The Bishan rubber-tyred metro, called Yunba, or cloud bus, is 15.4 kilometres long with 15 stations, running north to south from Bishan station on Line 1 of Chongqing Rail Transit to the railway station on the Chengdu-Chongqing intercity line. Construction began on 22 February 2019 and the line opened on 16 April 2021; it was the first SkyShuttle installation open to the public. The vehicles are driverless and reach 80 kilometres an hour, the maximum fare for a full journey is 4 yuan, and in 2021 the line carried 1.6701 million passengers.

The network is the point. On 30 December 2019 the Bishan station of Line 1 opened, giving the district a metro stop; the high-speed railway had already cut travel time to the Chongqing urban area to 15 minutes. Bishan is one of the twelve districts around the central city in the 2020 metropolitan plan, together with Hechuan, Yongchuan, Jiangjin, Tongnan, Tongliang, Rongchang, Dazu, Changshou, Fuling, Nanchuan and Qijiang. The corridor it sits on has a name in the wider geography: the Chengdu-Chongqing Economic Circle, the belt through a basin that covers the western half of Chongqing Municipality and the eastern third of Sichuan.