Uppsala County, Sweden
Right now, Dragon Gate is open for gelato, pizza, candy, and gas — not much else. The Chinese-themed hotel and museum complex on the E4 outside Älvkarleby has been "opening soon" in one form or another since 2008, and the operator's own website is upfront about it: the hotel is still closed, with a target reopening by the end of 2026. What's confirmed running day to day is Joey's Gelato, Joey's Pizza, a candy shop called Godisdraken, and the Preem petrol station, all 11:00–19:00 (the pump runs around the clock). The museum and its 200 replica terracotta soldiers made a brief public appearance over a weekend in late May 2026 — there's no indication yet that it's back to being a regular stop.
If that sounds like a strange thing to build a highway landmark around, that's the point. Dragon Gate has spent two decades as one of Sweden's best-known unfinished buildings, and the gap between what people expect to find and what's actually there is wide enough that it's worth sorting out before you pull off the E4.
What's open at Dragon Gate right now
According to the site's own current listings, four things are reliably running: Joey's Gelato, Joey's Pizza, and Godisdraken (the candy shop) all keep the same 11:00–19:00 daily hours, and the Preem fuel station is open around the clock. Public toilets are available during the same 11:00–19:00 window. A separate business called Alsike Maskin, which sells and services machinery, also operates on the property but has nothing to do with the tourist side of things.
The operator describes the rest of the site as "a place in motion and transformation" — official language for a lot of scaffolding and closed doors. The clearest recent sign of life: over the weekend of 29–31 May 2026, the arena and museum opened to visitors for a trial run, and the operator reported strong turnout. Nothing on the site says that's now a permanent, every-week arrangement, so anyone planning a special trip specifically for the museum should check the operator's site for current dates before driving out.
Why the museum is worth asking about first
What's inside, when it's open, is the reason Dragon Gate has a cult following at all. As one TravelFeed visitor documented after getting inside, the museum holds roughly 200 life-size terracotta warrior replicas lined up "like an army," reached via a 150-metre wooden-relief arcade the site bills as the world's longest. A Guanyin statue stands in the middle of the fortress-style compound, and there's a restaurant behind the main building.
The terracotta army isn't a generic prop shop purchase: Wikipedia's account credits the replicas to a collaboration with a museum in Xi'an, the Chinese city where the original army was excavated, and the exhibit is built around China's first emperor rather than treated as generic decoration. It's also the detail that's made Dragon Gate an internet punchline as much as a museum — a 2020 YouTube video by comedian Nigel Ng, better known as Uncle Roger, pointed a wider English-speaking audience at the site's mismatch of ambition and upkeep, and traffic to it has followed that kind of coverage more than any tourism-board campaign.
But the same account is also the clearest warning that this isn't a sure thing. On a September 2022 visit, the writer found the site "completely closed," with a sign citing renovation, no ticket counter, and no staff anywhere — a contrast with an earlier visit years before, when the museum was running normally. That in-and-out pattern is the whole story of Dragon Gate: it opens, it closes, it reopens under new management, and whoever shows up on a given day genuinely doesn't know which version they'll get. Calling ahead, or at minimum checking the operator's site the morning of, is the only way to avoid a wasted detour.
Why it looks half-built
Dragon Gate started as Hotel Älvkarlen in 1986, went bankrupt within two years, and spent the early 1990s as a refugee reception centre and then a roadside stop called Checkpoint Dalälven, according to Wikipedia. In 2004, Chinese businessman Li Jingchun bought it with the idea of building somewhere Chinese and Swedish culture could meet: a Guanyin statue went up in 2005, a Chinese square in 2007, and the museum opened in 2008 — the same year a Swedish construction-trade union magazine named the half-finished project "worst construction of the year." Sweden's Work Environment Authority separately fined the builder 1.1 million kronor over 13 separate labour-safety violations.
The hotel itself was structurally finished by 2014 but never opened; Swedish outlet The Local reported in 2024 that fire-code issues blocked it from taking guests, that a construction firm called Sisyfos had taken over the property, and that Covid closures in 2020 knocked out what little business the restaurant and museum had built up. The property went back on the market at roughly 40 million kronor in mid-2024. Whoever owns it now is the one promising an end-of-2026 hotel opening, citing a completed heating system and secured permits — a specific enough claim to be checkable, and worth checking again if you're reading this later in the year.
Getting there
Dragon Gate sits directly on the E4 in Älvkarleby, between Uppsala and Gävle — the operator's own site notes that around 30,000 vehicles pass the property every day, which is the entire reason a business complex went up on this spot in the first place. There's no train station at the site itself; a car is effectively required. From Uppsala it's roughly an hour's drive north on the E4, and continuing on the same road brings you into Gävle in well under an hour more. It's a major national route rather than a rural byway, but a Nordic winter drive is still a winter drive: check road conditions before an evening trip between November and March, when this stretch of the E4 can see snow and ice.
For anyone driving up from the Stockholm side, two stops from the same community cluster of writers sit roughly on the route north. A visit to Skokloster Castle, on a peninsula in Lake Mälaren between Sigtuna and Arlanda, makes a reasonable detour before rejoining the E4 — though the same account is a useful warning to fuel up properly first: the writer's car ran low near the castle and the only pump nearby stocked diesel and E85 ethanol, not standard petrol.
Uppsala itself sits squarely on the route, and a stop at Koh Phangan, a Thai restaurant on the Fyris River, is a documented lunch option before the final stretch north — the same writer's account mentions riverside window seats and a tuk-tuk booth among the seating, with high-speed trains also running the 30–50 minute Stockholm–Uppsala leg if you're not driving that far.
Is it worth the stop?
For what it currently offers day to day — gelato, pizza, and a petrol stop — Dragon Gate is a fine five-minute break on a longer E4 drive, not a destination in its own right. The compound's actual draw, the museum and the terracotta army, is intermittent enough that treating it as a bonus rather than the reason for the trip is the safer bet. If the operator's end-of-2026 hotel timeline holds and the museum settles into regular hours alongside it, that calculation changes; until then, the honest answer is that most of what made Dragon Gate famous is still behind closed doors more often than not.
For more on the wider region, see TravelFeed's Sweden destination page.
FAQ
Is Dragon Gate in Sweden currently open?
Partly. Joey's Gelato, Joey's Pizza, and the Godisdraken candy shop run 11:00–19:00 daily, and the Preem fuel station is open 24 hours, per the operator's current listings. The museum and terracotta army exhibit are not confirmed as regularly open — their most recent documented public access was a trial opening weekend in late May 2026 — and the hotel remains closed.
What is Dragon Gate in Älvkarleby?
An unfinished Chinese-Swedish culture and business complex on the E4 highway, started in 2004 by Chinese businessman Li Jingchun on the site of a former hotel. It was meant to include a hotel, restaurant, museum, and Shaolin-style training school; two decades on, only parts of that plan have ever operated at once.
How do you get to Dragon Gate from Stockholm or Uppsala?
By car on the E4 — there's no train station on site. It's roughly an hour's drive north of Uppsala, and about two hours from central Stockholm covering the same route, which also passes near Skokloster Castle and through Uppsala itself.
Will the Dragon Gate hotel ever open?
The site's current operator targets an opening by the end of 2026, pointing to a completed heating system and secured permits. The hotel has been structurally finished since 2014 without opening, through several changes of ownership and at least one fire-code holdup, so that date is worth reconfirming against the operator's site closer to your visit.
