2nd Ring Road
road in Beijing, China
The 2nd Ring Road (Chinese: 二环路; pinyin: èr huán lù) is the innermost ring road highway which encircles the city center of Beijing, People's Republic of China. (The first ring road had been a circular tram route.)
The ring road can be divided into two parts: the original ring road (the southern section of which is now excluded from the current ring road), and the newly extended ring road. This article only covers the current (new) 2nd Ring Road.
History and geography
The 2nd Ring Road runs close to where Beijing's city walls once stood; numerous junctions bear the old city gate's name. A small number of these city gates themselves still stand: Southeast corner tower, Deshengmen and Yongdingmen (which has been rebuilt). Most of the old city walls were pulled down shortly after the People's Republic of China was established in 1949.
Although it was suggested that the 2nd Ring Road was built over the old city walls, by comparing current city maps with old maps of Beijing, it has been found this is not exactly true. The road instead mostly follows the former moat that surrounded the city wall; in places, the moat survives as a canal. The 2nd ring road was completed in the 1980s.
All traffic lights were removed in the 1990s, and several new overpasses were built.
The public source identifies “2nd Ring Road” as road in Beijing, China. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ring, Road and road.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 31, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q210412. Authority coordinates are 39.898, 116.387. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “2nd Ring Road” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.