Beijing Subway

Every subway tells a story of the history, geography, politics and economic development of a city. London had the world’s first underground railway with the section between Paddington and Farringdon stations opening in 1863. It was constructed along the course of what had been the Fleet River that, at that time, was little more than an open sewer. The river was shallow and passed through a place called Broad Ford (between what were to become Euston and King’s Cross) where it could be forded and where Bodaceia, Queen of the Iceni, is said to have fought her last battle with the Romans in AD61. The Fleet River set the course for what was to become London’s Circle Line shown in yellow on these four maps below. The map used to navigate the London Underground transit system famously bears little resemblance to how the various lines actually cross the city. On the upper left below is the “Tube” map as many people know it and on the right how the map would look if it mapped the geographical location of the stations.

More geographically accurate versions are being trialled. I expect the 2025 proposal below is noisily detested by a certain kind of person who’d prefer to live in a stylized past than a messy present.

The graphic logic applied to the London Underground map has been applied to subway maps of many other cities. Below are the ones for Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai. The principle underlying the design of these maps isn’t that they have a lot of colours and are pretty even though they do and they are but that they are all you need to navigate a city. This logic sometime fails first-time visitors who might make two or more transfers to get to a place they could easily have walked to.

I had wanted to buy a physical map when I recently visited Beijing for the first but never got around to it so I arrived at Beijing South Station with only a vague idea of where it was with respect to the Forbidden City and my hotel. A helpful station attendant showed me how to scan a QR code and link my smartphone to the payment system and, within about 20 seconds, maps and money were irrelevant. I never did buy that map or, for that matter, saw anywhere selling them.

After I’d used the subway a few times I noticed it became newer and more convenient towards the periphery but this is probably true for any subway anywhere. Lines in a subway network generally don’t intersect but are stacked and this means that changing from one line to another always involves changing levels by stairs, escalators and elevators. Beijing Subway is interesting because nearly all transfer stations involve only two lines unlike, say, Tokyo’s Shibuya or Otemachi stations.

Beijing Subway transfers don’t involve large changes of level but sometimes have long passageways sometimes going up only to go down again, or vice-versa. This seems to indicate that the entire network is not very deep and is constructed on two or maybe three levels. Other people have done the work here.

• One Reddit thread says the long transfers were purposely designed to act as buffers preventing overcrowding on the initial short platforms designed for six-carriage trains. Here’s some examples.
• OurChinaStory tells me that [I paraphrase] “the first phase of the Beijing Subway was the earliest subway line in China and mainland Asia [Tokyo’s first line began service between Asakusa and Shiibuya in 1927.] Planning for Beijing Subway began in the 1950s. The first phase was completed in July 1965, trial operation began in 1971 and the line opened to the public in 1981.” Very little expansion occurred until the 1990s. (China Cultural Revolution 1955–1976)
• Trains Plus More provides many more facts and observations from a long-term Beijing Subway user.
• This Wikimedia Commons gif (for up to 2018) shows how Beijing Subway expanded but doesn’t offer any reasons why. I’ll break it down.

1971 January 15: Line 1 is built eastwards from Beijing Station that was the city’s main mainline station at the time. “Chairman Mao had said this line was to be for military needs as well as urban transportation. At the time, the population of Beijing at the time was ab out three million.” One site says Line 1 was intended to whisk officials out of the city should the need arise. This lower part of Line 1 would intersect the four main north-south commercial roads leading to the Forbidden City.

1971 August 15: Line 1 is extended to Yuquanlu. Trial operation began.

1971 November 7: Line 1 extended further to Guchenglu.

1973 April 23: Opening of Line 1 extension to Pingguoyuan. [Apple Orchard] which is the current western terminus of Line 1. Line 1 wasn’t to open to the public until 1981.

1984 September 20: But by 1984 Line 1 was open and the first phase of Line 2 and what was to become the first circle line opens (left, below). It’s more usual than not for a city’s subway network to have a circle (loop) line because it distributes the number of transfer stations and reduces the number of journeys into the city centre. The 1973 image (middle, below) shows how the network was envisaged to develop. It shows Line 1 running on the same track as Line 2 but the dashed line shows it would ultimately not intersect Line 2 in the same plane.

1987 September 28: About three years later, Line 2 appropriates the track of Line 1 and Line 1 is shortened to Fuxingmen Station that becomes Beijing Subway’s first transfer station (right, above). This can only happen if the two lines were on the same level to begin with.

1992 December 12: If Line 1 and Line 2 had been constructed at the same level (to allow for part of Line 2 to run on track of the former Line 1) then the remaining part of Line 1 needed to pass either under or over Line 2 and establish the layering with, in principle, east-west lines on one layer and north-south lines on another. What happened was Line 1 passed under line 2 at Fuxingmen Station which became Beijing Subway’s first transfer station.

1999 September 28: Seven years later comes the new Fuba Line from the east. It’s obviously going to join up with Line 1 to close the remaining gap between Xidan and Tian’menxi. This Fuba Line passes through what’s now the CBD and creates the second transfer station at Jianguomen in the east. The naming logic seems to be to first give line fragments names and to later change them to the number of the line they connect to. The current Beijing Subway map shows 19 numbered lines and seven fragment lines. 

2000 June 28: Fuba Line opens as Line 1 in 2000. The west most station of Sihui Dong (E) station was a temporary terminus. 

2002 September 28: Suddenly we leap to the west part of Line 13. The name implies an east part is forthcoming and would be symmetrical to encompass this nothernm part of Beijing where the Olympic Park and Stadia were planned for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

This 2004 Beijing Subway map that shows everything above. The circle line is crossed by an east-west line, and Line 13 (which is mostly elevated) is there in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics. The Forbidden City is always at the centre of these maps, revealing the Chinese preference for symmetry.

2007 October 7: Symmetry is temporarily interrupted with the opening of the new Line 5.

Line 5 (the vertical one) meets Line 2 (the circle line) at Yonghegong Station (雍和宫/Lama Temple) Station in the north.

What the platform diagram below doesn’t show is the Line 5 platforms at Yonghegong Station is on two levels. The higher east platform was built when the original Line 2 was built and the lower-level west platform was built after but this doesn’t explain why the level difference. It’s not something one would choose to do but spatially, it’s rather nice. It made me wonder what a subway station would look like if all the lines, platforms, stairs, escalators and elevators all traversed a single underground space. It’d be Piranesi but legible. Taking that thought in another direction, I imagined the entire network as a 3D model showing the positions of all lines, platforms and linkages. Maybe such a model exists?

2008 July 19: Line 10 hooks up with the new Line 8 (The Olympic Branch) and the AirPort Express. This map is what people arriving for the Olympics saw. Line 10 is the beginning of the second circle line. A new line called the Baotong Line appears, sharing two stations with Line 1. Where Line 1 intersects Line 10 is the CBD.

2009 September 28: The Olympics speed things up with Phase 1 of Line 8 (that became the Olympic Branch) and Phase 1 Line 10 opening to create the first phase of what was to become the second circle line. It also connects with the AirPort Express linking Beijing Capital, Beijing’s main international airport. Line 4 also opens.

Everything leading up to 2008 and the Olympic Games was the first major expansion of the subway network. The second major expansion was post-Olympics and into the suburbs. The network has continued to expand over the past 15 years. I’ll switch to slideshow.

Below is the 2025 map. [10KMB pdf download here] It looks like Line 17 (the green one upper right) will be extended south to link with lines 6, 1, 7, 14 and 10 and perhaps the extension of 5. There’s a couple more gaps waiting to be filled. Line 15 doesn’t look like it will stop there for long. Line 11 is obviously still a fragment. Since the network is already working to capacity, perhaps a third circle line will happen in the future. It might possibly be Line 13 (or part of it) because it’s currently an exception and functions as a partial third circle line anyway. That this line, although numbered 13 was one of the first extensions built, shows how development around the Olympic Park and Stadia was anticipated.

Below is the geographically correct map of Beijing Subway. Towards the extremities, locations of the various lines are increasingly determined by the geography of rivers and valleys and how they influenced the pattern of settlement.

The centre of the network however remains a grid with its 27 lines having many transfer options. This is good in that a disruption on one line doesn’t spread across the network.

With any subway system in any city, it’s never good to over-rely upon a network map since going from A to B might involve two transfers when it may have been quicker to walk. I made this mistake twice. The first time I made two transfers to get to the CCTV building and the second I made two transfers to get to Workers’ Stadium (next to the China Philharmonic Concert Hall) and only later discovered I could see both from my hotel room. Weather, time and energy permitting, it’s a good idea to compare transit times for both subway and on foot.

The grid nature of the centre portion of Beijing Subway poses special problems for navigation apps because, grids being grids, there are many ways of getting from one point to another. There’s no guarantee the option you’re presented with will be better than any other. Once, oddly, my app was confounded and recommended I change from Line 10 to Line 2 at such and such a station but Line 10 and Line 2 are concentric circle lines and don’t meet. Changing apps didn’t help as the navigation information provider remained the same. Personal experience and knowledge of stations and transfer distances and times still matters.

Afterword: There’s a lot of information here and if there are any inaccuracies please get in touch. Many people know far more about Beijing Subway than me and some are aficionados with extensive knowledge and lengthy experience. Beijing Subway seems to generate a lot of affection from the 40% of Beijing people who use it regularly. The annual passenger volume of Beijing Subway is 3.62 billion which is close to being half the population of the world.

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