先下后上! After a Bumpy Start, Beijing Metro Celebrates 50 Years
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The Beijing Metro, the world's busiest and second longest subway system, officially turned 50 last month and it remains one of the best ways to get around the city, with over 670km of track delivering an average of 10.5 million trips per day. The oldest metro system in China commenced service on Oct 1, 1969 as part of Beijing's celebration of the 20th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. While today it seems like Beijing opens a new metro line every year, constructing the initial line was not easy. It took 15 years from conception until the first cars rolled under the Beijing streets and three decades would pass before there was a Line 2.
In 1953, Mao Zedong began pushing the Beijing Municipal Committee to begin construction of a subway line as part of the Party's transformation of Beijing into their particular vision of a socialist capital. But the proposed metro was as much about military preparedness as modernizing Beijing. The new leaders were impressed with how the Moscow metro had been used to protect civilians and move troops during World War II. Premier Zhou Enlai was blunt in his assessment of the need for a subway in a city of three million people who mostly still traveled by foot or, if they were lucky, by bicycle. "The construction of the subway in Beijing is entirely in preparation for war," Zhou reportedly said. "If you want to improve city transportation, we could do so easily by just buying 200 buses."
The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 added additional pressure on city and national leaders to better prepare Beijing in the event of bombing or invasion.
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The challenge, as was often the case in the early years of the PRC, was a lack of trained personnel to plan and supervise the construction. Initially, the gap was filled with technical advisers from East Germany and the Soviet Union. Several thousand Chinese students were also sent to the Soviet Union to learn how to build a subway.
"The construction of the subway in Beijing is entirely in preparation for war," Premier Zhou Enlai is reported to have said
The Soviet and East German advisers worked with their Chinese counterparts to map out potential routes for the new metro. One plan was for a line to travel from east to west more or less following where Line 1 is today. The other option was for a line that would connect the center of Beijing with the Western Hills and the area near the Summer Palace. (A route eventually followed by Line 4 when that line opened in 2009.) Strategic and geological concerns took precedence. The soil conditions northwest of the city threatened to slow the building of the line out to the Summer Palace. The PLA had begun moving into buildings and bases originally constructed by Japanese occupation forces west of the city center. Striking where the ground was easiest and the need greatest, planners proposed to begin digging in the suburbs west of Beijing and then head east.
There were also problems with depth. The original idea had been to build deep tunnels that could provide shelter in case of war. Some of the first shafts dug near today's Gonzhufen (公主坟 gōngzhǔfén) and Muxidi (木樨地 mùxīdi) metro stops reached over 120 meters deep. These were at the time some of the deepest subway tunnels in the world. But while Beijing lacks rivers, it does have a high underground water table. Problems of drainage forced authorities to abandon their plans for deeper tunnels.
Politics also got in the way. The Sino-Soviet split meant that most of the foreign technical advisers had left China by 1960. Moreover, the disastrous policies of the Great Leap Forward shifted leaders' attention away from urban infrastructure as they grappled with widespread famine. In November 1961, plans for the new metro were temporarily suspended.
But in February 1965 the city revived plans to build the metro line. Construction officially began on Jul 1 of that year, with a ceremony attended by national leaders including Deng Xiaoping, Marshall Zhu De, and Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen. Construction began on a hybrid plan which would run from the newly constructed Beijing Railway Station westward toward Pingguoyuan (苹果园 píngguǒyuán). The route roughly followed what is today the western section of Line 1 plus the lower half of Line 2.
The first portion of the subway roughly follows where the western section of Line 1 and the lower half of Line 2 are today
Perhaps the most controversial part of the project was the dismantling of what was left of the magnificent Beijing city wall, long one of the most famous landmarks in China. The gate at Qianmen (前门 qiánmén) earned a reprieve only after a slight rerouting of the original route.
Despite the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, construction of the first metro line was completed in time for the 1969 National Day celebrations. The line ran 21km and had 16 stations. Initially, however, the metro was only for invited guests or those with specially prepared credential letters authorizing them to travel by subway. There were also technical problems. A fire in November 1969 killed three people, injuring over 100 others and destroying two subway cars. Between the political chaos of the still ongoing Cultural Revolution and engineering issues along the new line, Premier Zhou ordered the PLA to take over operations of the Beijing metro in 1970.
Building of Line 1 forced the dismantling of what was left of Beijing's city wall (tap image for larger view)
In late 1972, the government finally removed the requirement that riders present credential letters before buying tickets, but problems continued. Until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the metro was closed almost as often as it was open. Nevertheless, it still averaged between 40,000-50,000 riders on the days when it was running.
In the late 1970s, ridership on the Beijing Metro grew steadily. Residents enjoyed a better and more reliable service and the number of annual trips by 1980 topped 50 million (or, basically, one work-week in 2019 terms).
In 1981, a state-owned company, the Beijing Subway Company, was formed to manage metro operations. On Sep 15 of that year, the 12-year "trial period" for the metro officially ended. By 1984, the first section of a proposed second line opened with the original "Line 1" operating from Pingguoyuan to Fuxingmen (复兴门 fùxīngmén) and what would become "Line 2," then known as the "Ring Line," running from Fuxingmen to Jianguomen (建国门 jiànguómén). The ring would be completed in 1987.
Line 2 was actually called the "Ring Line" when it first opened (tap image for larger view)
Construction of Line 1 continued after the establishment of its partner line. In 1992, Xidan Station (西单 xīdān) opened. Eight years later, the western section of Line 1 was extended underneath the politically sensitive (and strategically important) area west of Tiananmen Square (天安门广场 tiān'ānmén guǎngchǎng) to connect the Xidan Station with the Tiananmen East Station (天安门东 tiān'ānmén dōng). On Jun 28, 2000, it finally became possible to ride Line 1 from Pingguoyuan in the western suburbs through the city center and out to Sihui (四惠 sìhuì).
By 2000, it was finally possible to ride Line 1 from Pingguoyuan in the west, through the city center, and all the way out to Sihui (tap image for larger view)
From these humble and arduous beginnings, Beijing's metro lines have continued to expand, particularly rapidly in the last handful of years, as the animated gif below illustrates. Thirty years after the first trains rumbled under the city, the metro continues to be an essential part of Beijing's transportation puzzle.
The track-laying magic in action (tap image for larger view)
Right now, four additional subway lines are under construction (Line 3, Line 12, Line 17, and Line 19) as well as two light-rail projects in the east of the city and Shunyi, respectively (read more about this via QR code below).
If all goes to plan, this is what the Beijing Metro system will look like by 2022 (tap image for larger view):
The Beijing Metro as it is predicted to look by 2022 (click for a larger image)
Now, if we could only get folks at transfer stations to stop trying to walk from train to train while watching videos on their cell phones...
Images: Baidu, 闲拾时光的博客 (via blog.sina.com.cn), reddit, Hat600 via Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org)
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