The first 1,435 mm standard gauge railway to be built and survive in China was the Kaiping (開平) colliery tramway located at Tangshan in Hebei province. However, this was not the very first railway in China. An earlier attempt to introduce railways had been made in 1876 when the short Shanghai to Wusong narrow gauge line known as the "Woosung Road Company" was built but then pulled up within less than two years because of Chinese government opposition.

The Woosung railway was a 19th-century, 2 ft 6 in narrow-gauge passenger railway in Shanghai, China, between the outskirts of the American Concession in the modern city's Zhabei District and Wusong in Baoshan District. Surreptitiously conceived and constructed, it ran for less than a year before it was purchased and dismantled by the Qing viceroy Shen Baozhen. The line would not be rebuilt for twenty years. This fate was a commonly invoked symbol of the Qing dynasty's backwardness and insularity, despite the road's admitted illegality and numerous legitimate objections voiced by the Chinese during its construction and operation.