Karakoram Highway
international highway running through Pakistan, China
The Karakoram Highway (Urdu: شاہراہِ قراقرم, Śāhirāh-i Qarāquram), also known as the KKH, National Highway 35 (Urdu: قومی شاہراہ ۳۵), N-35, and the China–Pakistan Friendship Highway, is a 1,300 km (810 mi) long national highway which extends from Hasan Abdal in the Punjab province of Pakistan to the Khunjerab Pass in Gilgit-Baltistan, where it crosses into China and becomes China National Highway 314.
The highway connects the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as well as Gilgit-Baltistan with China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The highway is a popular tourist attraction and is one of the highest paved roads in the world, passing through the Karakoram mountain range, at at maximum elevation of 4,714 m (15,466 ft) near Khunjerab Pass. Due to its high elevation and the difficult conditions under which it was constructed, it is sometimes referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World. The highway is also a part of the Asian Highway AH4.
History
The Karakoram Highway (KKH), also known as the Friendship Highway in China, was jointly constructed by the governments of China and Pakistan. It was started in 1962, completed in 1979 and opened to the public in 1986. Pakistan initially favored routing through Mintaka Pass. In 1966, China, citing the fact that Mintaka would be more susceptible to air strikes, recommended the steeper Khunjerab Pass instead. About 810 Pakistanis and about 200 Chinese workers died, mostly in landslides and falls, while building the highway.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q217099. VIAF identifies the subject as 315144452. The Library of Congress control number is sh87007210. Authority coordinates are 36.850, 75.428. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1979, 1986 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karakoram Highway” 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.