Bridge Linking China and North Korea Officially Opens, with Trucks Queuing
China and North Korea officially opened a bridge linking the two countries’ mainland territories on Thursday (15 October), local time, after years of delay. The opening took place 12 years after construction of the bridge was completed.
The bridge is intended to revive trade and economic activity after relations between the two countries deteriorated for several years, while the COVID-19 pandemic also disrupted cross-border exchanges.
The New Yalu River Bridge, Reuters and AFP reported on Thursday (15 October 2026), stretches 3 kilometres — 3,026 metres to be precise — over the Yalu River, which separates China and North Korea. North Korea calls it the Amnok River.
The bridge connects Dandong in China with Sinuiju in North Korea. It has four lanes and is reserved for motor vehicles.
A Chinese customs facility stands at the end of the 1.3-kilometre approach. Activity there has increased in recent days. Trucks decorated with Chinese flags were seen waiting on the bridge ahead of the opening of cross-border traffic on Thursday (15 October), local time.
Crowds also gathered on the Chinese side of the border, along a road overlooking the bridge. Chinese and North Korean flags were displayed along the cable-stayed structure, whose towers rise high above the river.
‘This is wonderful,’ said a woman who had come to watch the opening in Dandong, a quiet border city in northern China.
‘Ten years have passed. This will certainly be good for business,’ she said, asking not to be named.
The bridge was completed in 2014, but its opening was delayed because connecting roads and a customs complex on the North Korean side had not been completed. Pyongyang also closed its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new bridge is intended to provide an alternative to the decades-old China–North Korea Friendship Bridge, which crosses the Yalu River elsewhere.
On Thursday (15 October), China’s Xinhua news agency reported that the two countries had held an inauguration ceremony for the new bridge. North Korean state media had not reported on the ceremony.
The opening marks progress in bilateral relations between Beijing and Pyongyang, following two summits between the countries’ leaders over the past year.
China remains North Korea’s largest trading partner, even after a series of UN sanctions prohibited the flow of goods and movement of workers to and from North Korea in response to its development of missiles and nuclear weapons.
Lim Eul Chul of Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies said the bridge was ‘unlikely to trigger a full resumption of trade immediately, at the level seen before sanctions’.
However, Lim said, the bridge would facilitate the transport of heavy equipment, raw materials and energy products needed for various development projects in North Korea.