How China Dug the World’s Longest Tunnel Through Deadly Mountains

Source : thechinaacademy.org – August 2026

https://thechinaacademy.org/how-china-dug-the-worlds-longest-tunnel-through-deadly-mountains/

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n December 2025, the Tianshan Victory Tunnel, a decade in the planning and seven years in construction, officially opened to traffic. This reduced the original 20-hour train journey to just 20 minutes by car. In this article, Project Manager Zhou introduced how they overcame difficulties in the deadly mountain at an altitude of 7,443 meters and built this world’s longest highway tunnel.

The following is a transcript of remarks by Zhou Zheng, who oversaw the construction of the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel, on China’s popular current affairs show China Now.

Zhou Zheng, general manager of the CCCC Xinjiang Urumqi-Yuli Expressway PPP Project:

Stretching over 2,500 kilometers, the Tianshan Mountains run like a giant dragon across the middle of Xinjiang, dividing the region into two halves—what we commonly call southern Xinjiang and northern Xinjiang. In the past, driving from Ürümqi to Korla meant navigating winding mountain roads over the Tianshan range, taking over three hours—and when heavy snow closed the pass, you could be stuck waiting for days. Today, drivers can cross in just 20 minutes, thanks to this tunnel—the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel.

This is the longest expressway tunnel in the world, with a total length of 22.13 kilometers. It was officially opened to traffic on December 26, 2025. The tunnel cuts through the Tianshan Mountains. Some might ask: was it absolutely necessary to bore through the Tianshan? Couldn’t we just go around? But the Tianshan range lies squarely across central Xinjiang, blocking north-south passage. Since ancient times, crossing the Tianshan has carried the dreams of countless people. Zhang Qian, who opened the Silk Road to the Western Regions, once traversed its mountain paths. Starting in the 1950s, tens of thousands of road builders marched to the Tianshan and, with their own flesh and blood, constructed the Wuku Highway—now part of China’s National Highway network. Yet winter snows blanketed the range, making year-round all-weather travel impossible. Building a fast passage across the Tianshan became a burning dream for all the peoples of Xinjiang.

But where to build the tunnel, how to construct it, how to address environmental and water-conservation concerns, how to guarantee all-weather operation, and how to work in temperatures as low as -40°C—these were all enormous challenges. That’s why the project took ten years of design work. And the actual construction didn’t start until 2017. Why such painstaking effort? Because China’s development cannot leave any of its people behind, no matter where they live.

Xinjiang tour guide Dili Nur knows this truth better than most. She is a child of Atushi in southern Xinjiang. As a child, the northern Xinjiang beyond the Tianshan Mountains felt impossibly distant to her. When she was admitted to university in Ürümqi, the 1,500-kilometer journey required over 20 hours by train—all that time wasted going around the Tianshan. Later, when she saw news that a tunnel would be drilled through the Tianshan, her first reaction was: But that’s the vast, endless Tianshan—how could that be possible? Yet just 52 months later, the miracle happened. She said: “The road through the Tianshan was literally bored open by our country, cutting the journey to just 20 minutes. Can you imagine the shock I felt?”

So this tunnel had to be built! But how difficult was it? Only after the plan was finalized and excavation began did we truly understand the scale of the challenge. The Tianshan is known as a “geological museum”—rock bursts, water inrushes, and large-scale deformation of soft rock occur constantly. The tunnel crosses 16 geological fault zones, where the rock is fractured and water-rich, making collapses and water-and-mud inrushes highly likely.

The tunnel’s maximum burial depth is 1,100 meters—equivalent to a building over 360 stories tall. The greater the depth, the higher the probability of rock bursts, soft-rock deformation, and high-pressure water inrushes. The maximum in-situ stress in the tunnel approaches 22 MPa—meaning a piece of rock the size of a fingernail must bear over 200 kilograms of weight. Then there’s the climate difficulty. The tunnel lies in an uninhabited high-altitude area above 3,000 meters in the Tianshan range, with an average annual temperature of -5.4°C and lows reaching -41.5°C. Academician-led teams and industry experts all agreed that tunneling through the altered metamorphic zones of the Tianshan was like “building engineering inside tofu pudding.” The altered hard rock, once exposed to water, turns into mud—you could crush it with your fingers.

If built with conventional methods—digging from both ends toward the middle—the tunnel would have taken at least ten years. But the entire Urumqi-Yuli Expressway had a construction deadline of just six years. How to deal with that? We came up with our own solution: the “three-tunnel plus four-shaft” method.

In a conventional tunnel, you see one tunnel on each side. But in the Tianshan, we added a central pilot tunnel between the two main bores. Two hard-rock tunnel boring machines (TBMs) were launched from the north and south ends simultaneously to excavate the pilot tunnel. Then, from this pilot tunnel, working faces were opened to both sides, effectively dividing the entire tunnel into over a dozen sections to be excavated at the same time. This dramatically shortened the construction period. This is what we call “long tunnel, short excavation”—turning one long tunnel into multiple short segments built concurrently, reducing the timeline from 72 months to 52 months.

The two TBMs were our “winning weapons”—one named “Tianshan” and the other “Shengli (Victory)”. Each has an excavation diameter of 8.43 meters and weighs over 2,000 tons. They are the world’s first innovative pressurized grouting TBMs, capable of intelligently switching excavation modes based on geological conditions: when encountering intact rock, they can bore at high speed in open mode; when facing fractured strata, they switch to pressurized concrete support mode. Our “Shengli” TBM set a record of 35 meters in a single day and 528 meters in a single month. The “Tianshan” TBM successfully crossed the F6 fault zone, where daily water inflow exceeded 10,000 cubic meters.

But even with such “magic tools,” we ran into major trouble. In August 2023, the “Tianshan” TBM had bored 8 kilometers when it suddenly encountered a fault-altered zone that had not been detected in geological surveys. A mixture of rock blocks, gravel, and slurry burst in through gaps around the cutterhead and shield, and the debris—like tofu dregs—jammed the cutterhead. The 2,000-ton “Tianshan” TBM was trapped. A stretch of just 60 meters held up construction for 14 full months. The task force worked day and night inside the tunnel, trying every possible solution, and finally adopted a “detour pilot tunnel method” that successfully freed the TBM.

On December 30, 2024, the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel was holed through—17 months ahead of our original schedule. Once the tunnel opened, people’s lives changed in tangible ways. The drive from Ürümqi to Korla was cut from 7 hours to 3.5 hours, and crossing the Tianshan from over 3 hours to just 20 minutes. “Enjoy the snow of northern Xinjiang in the morning, and the sand of southern Xinjiang by noon” became a reality.

Logistics transformed as well. Truck driver Maimaitiming did the math: a single trip to Korla saved over 300 yuan in fuel costs alone; load in the morning, unload at noon. Previously, he rarely took freight orders from Ürümqi to Korla—not just because of the distance, but because the Gangou section was notoriously hard to drive, with endless steep slopes and sharp curves that left him drenched in sweat every time. Now, it’s a different story.

Tourism boomed too. After the tunnel opened, Korla’s “one-day tours” took off. During the 2026 Spring Festival holiday, Korla received a total of 528,000 tourist visits. What does that mean? A year-on-year increase of 22.07%.

Emergency medical response became faster. On the night of December 27, 2025—the very next day after opening—a 3-year-old child with meningitis in Bayingolin Prefecture urgently needed transfer to Ürümqi for treatment. This race against time took just 2 hours and 47 minutes. Herder Baye, whose family has lived at the foot of the Tianshan for generations, said that in the past, when a family member had a critical illness and needed to go to northern Xinjiang for treatment, driving up the mountain to over 3,000 meters often meant hitting snow-blocked roads and having to turn back. Now, it’s different—20 minutes and you’re through.

The tunnel has been open for over half a year, with more than 2.3 million vehicles passing through. There is no longer any geographical barrier between southern and northern Xinjiang.

Why has China been able to work this miracle once again? 22.13 kilometers—the world’s longest expressway tunnel; 16 geological fault zones, crossed one by one; 52 months—holing through an ultra-long tunnel in a frigid alpine region. What lies behind these numbers? It is “for the people.” When Dili Nur led Taiwanese tourists through the tunnel, she said the words that went viral across the internet: “Because the people need a road that is easy to travel, and our motherland can make mountains give way and rivers bow down. It’s not that ‘boring through the Tianshan is easy’—it’s that ‘on the other side of the Tianshan, there are people.’”

China pioneered the “three-tunnel plus four-shaft” approach domestically and the world’s first innovative pressurized grouting TBM. The project team carried out intensive scientific and technological research around tunnel construction, securing 1 international patent, 67 invention patents, 156 utility model patents, 43 provincial-ministerial-level construction methods, 12 software copyrights, and drafting 6 industry group standards and 2 technical guidelines. Tunnel builders spent over 300 days a year on the front lines of the project. When the tunnel was holed through, everyone was deeply moved—the technicians and construction workers on site cheered, embraced each other, and many shed tears of joy.

22.13 kilometers is not just a number on the world record books. It has brought southern and northern Xinjiang closer together and turned the dreams of generations into reality. This is China’s infrastructure philosophy—not creating miracles for the sake of creating miracles, but to enable every ordinary person to live a better life.