Three minutes above the Yangtze

Construction began on 15 March 1986 and the cableway opened on 24 October 1987. It is 1,166 metres long, from the north station at 267 metres on Xinhua Road to the south station at 225 metres below Zhenwu Mountain at Longmenhao; the lowest point of the cable is 215 metres above the water. Each cabin holds 81 people including the driver. The top speed is 10 metres per second, the crossing takes three minutes, and the daily capacity is 30,000. Four load-bearing cables came from West Germany; everything else was designed and built in China. The investment was 14.5 million yuan.

It was the city's second cross-river cableway and the first large passenger cableway in China of the double-carry, double-traction, single-span reciprocating kind. Before the bridges, the rivers were crossed by ferry, and the cableway cut a journey that had waited on the water. The other line, over the Jialing, opened in 1983 between Cangbai Road and Jinsha Street. When the bridges went up the passengers fell away and the cars were left to visitors; the Jialing line stopped on 1 March 2011 and was demolished at the end of December 2013.

The Yangtze line survived. It was listed as a municipal protected building on 15 December 2009 and rated a national 4A scenic area on 6 February 2018. It crosses a reach of the Yangtze that belongs to the fluctuating backwater of the Three Gorges reservoir, which begins at Jiangjin Honghuaqi and runs down to Fuling. Its value changed with the view: the south bank below Longmenhao became Nanbin Road, a 25-kilometre strip that combines flood defence, a city road, old-city redevelopment and restaurants, and the north station stands a short walk from Jiefangbei. What was built as transport now works as a three-minute lookout, with the water 215 metres below and both banks in sight.