11 June 1998

Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway opened for service

On June 11, 1998, the first local railway co-financed by Mainland China and Hong Kong, the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway (金溫鐵路), opened for service.

From conception to completion of the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway, it took nearly 100 years. As early as April 1912, Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) took a ship from Shanghai to Wenzhou, and proposed the idea of building the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway after an on-the-spot investigation of the railway and port construction.

After China's implementation of the Reform and Opening-up in the late 1970s, there was a stronger call from the local government and the public for the construction of the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway, as the economy developed.

By the early 1990s, with joint efforts and fundraising by a famous scholar from Hong Kong, Nan Huai-Chin (南懷瑾), who was originally from Leqing, Wenzhou, the feasibility report for the construction of the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway, a joint venture between Zhejiang Province and Hong Kong's Union Profit Inc. Limited (香港聯盈興業有限公司), was finally approved by the State Planning Committee in September 1991, setting a precedent for Mainland China joint venture railway construction.

The Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway starts from Xindongxiao in Jinhua and passes through counties and cities such as Wuyi, Yongkang, Jinyun, Lishui, Qingtian, and ends at Longwan in Wenzhou, with a total length of 251 kilometres.

It is also the first joint-stock railway in China. Under the "monolithic" situation of the then-China State Railway Group's (國鐵集團), such locally controlled railways were one of the few exceptions.

And it was the earliest railway that started to make profits. In the first year of the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway's operation, passenger traffic had reached 4 million, achieving the expected goal 10 years ahead of schedule.

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