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The dashed line joins the two city centres; the true shortest path on the globe is a great-circle arc, and real flight paths also bend around restricted airspace and follow airways.

Across the roof of the world

Few Asian routes cross terrain as dramatic as this one. The great-circle line heads west-southwest from Beijing over Shanxi, Ningxia and Gansu, then across Qinghai and the high, thinly populated Tibetan Plateau. It meets the Himalaya not far from Mount Kailash before descending to the plains of Uttarakhand and Delhi. Airlines generally limit time over the plateau because of the terrain constraints on emergency descents, so the route actually flown can bend away from the straight line.

Flights after a five-year gap

Direct air links between India and China were suspended in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the Galwan Valley border clash, and stayed closed for years. Services between the two countries began returning in late 2025, and nonstop flights between Beijing Capital (PEK) and Delhi's Indira Gandhi International (DEL) resumed in April 2026. Before then, travellers connected through hubs such as Hong Kong, Bangkok or Singapore.

Neighbours with a long frontier

Delhi and Beijing are the capitals of the world's two most populous countries, which share a long and partly disputed Himalayan border. Trade between them is large, and Buddhism, which travelled from India to China along the Silk Road, is one of their oldest cultural links. See the India vs China comparison for more.