Land-sea freight route connects China's Chongqing, Indonesia

A new land-sea freight route was launched Friday, linking southwest China's Chongqing Municipality and Indonesia.

A freight train carrying 25 containers of auto parts, worth over 5 million yuan (about 740,000 U.S. dollars), departed from Chongqing Friday and will eventually be transported by sea to Indonesia.

Rail transport will take about two days from Chongqing to Beibu Gulf in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and the total shipping time to the southeast Asian country will be shortened to about 20 days, about two thirds of the time for traditional river-sea transportation.

The new route is part of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, a trade and logistics passage jointly built by western Chinese provincial regions and Singapore under the framework of the China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity.

With Chongqing as the transport hub, the corridor uses ports in Guangxi's Beibu Gulf to reach ports around the world.

So far, freight trains have made 915 trips via the corridor, which links 173 ports in 73 countries and regions worldwide.