Published : 2025-03-21

On March 21, 2008, the China section of the Kunming–Bangkok Expressway was fully opened.

The Kunming–Bangkok Expressway is one of the four land routes connecting China's Yunnan Province to Southeast Asia and South Asia.

It starts in Kunming, China, and ends in Bangkok, with a total length of over 1,800 kilometres, including a 688-kilometre segment within China.

With the opening of the China section, the journey from Kunming to Mohan, the border between China and Laos, takes about 10 hours.

Yunnan is an important gateway in Southwest China and has a unique geographical advantage in China's exchanges and cooperation with Southeast and South Asian countries.

The Kunming-Bangkok highway is not only a critical infrastructure for the construction of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area, but also one of the key projects in the economic cooperation of the Lancang-Mekong subregion and an important part of the Asian highway network.

The construction of the Kunming–Bangkok Expressway is of great significance for enhancing transportation capacity, improving transportation conditions along the route, achieving shared regional prosperity and development, and promoting the construction of international corridors connecting China with Southeast and South Asia.

In December 2008, the entire Kunming–Bangkok Expressway was officially opened, becoming the most convenient land route from China's southwest to Bangkok, Thailand, and the Indochina Peninsula.

It is also the most important north-south corridor in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) economic cooperation.

The highway runs through central and southern Yunnan Province, northeast Laos, and northern and central Thailand, and connects with the road networks of Malaysia and Singapore.

The travel time from Kunming to Bangkok was significantly shortened from more than 40 hours to about 20 hours.