From Xining in central China to Lhasa in Tibet, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway stretches nearly 2,000 km across the Himalayan plateau.
There was very little sign of human life outside this window of our train. If it was visible, only the golden grass spread as far as the eye could see on this land called the roof of the earth, which met the horizon on the highest hills of the planet.
If the train stopped at any point, the passengers could not survive the strong winds for long as there was no potable water and no trees for shade.
If anything was visible, it was the skeleton of a dead yak that had been scavenged by animals, or the ruins of Mao-era military installations after the war.
Passing here, I thought of the first foreign adventurers who tried to reach the city of Lhasa, which for a time was closed to non-locals. Such as the eccentric Thomas Manning from Norwich who left Guangzhou for Calcutta in early 1811, disturbed by the troubles in China.
Accompanied by a Chinese Catholic named Zhao, Manning managed to cross the Bhutan-Tibet border unhindered, and after months of hard travel, eventually became the first Englishman to reach the sacred capital of Upper Tibet.
When Manning arrived in Lhasa, he found it to be a dirty and poor city, but despite this, he had the opportunity to meet the six-year-old Dalai Lama. He was then imprisoned by Amban, who had been appointed to Tibet by Beijing. He remained imprisoned until Emperor Jiaqing ordered him to be taken to the border in chains and deported.
Although in the decades that followed, foreign traders forced China to open its coasts through naval wars and unilateral treaties, adventurers, cartographers, mountaineers, missionaries, gold seekers and Travel writers dreamed of entering the fortress built in a city called the ‘Roof of the World’.
They came from all over the world, their goals were different, but what they had to face was a country plagued by wolves, earthquakes, and smallpox. which was completely cut off from the rest of the world and populated by usurping monks, determined border guards and armed bandits.
Many people were killed in the attempt after Manning. It was the British rule that finally brought Lhasa to the world stage. This became possible when the Tibet Frontier Commission in India across the border was mandated to settle trade issues between Britain and Tibet. The commission was a military unit headed by Francis Younghusband whose only job was to appease the Empire and who achieved this through the Guru War (also known as the Massacre by some).
To deal with this attack, the Tibetans came out with old mechlok guns and pictures of the Dalai Lama. They believed that pictures of the Dalai Lama would protect them. But how could these things compete with Enfield rifles and Maxim guns that were capable of firing hundreds of rounds a minute?
The fighting, which began after a British soldier accidentally fired a bullet, resulted in the defeat of the Tibetan army.
Those who survived went away in silence, unable to understand what had happened to them. The British soldiers should at least be commended for trying to save the wounded Tibetans.
He then advanced towards Lhasa, encountering several skirmishes along the way, including the Battle of Karoo Pass, known as the most high-altitude battle in history.
The British army finally managed to reach the holy city. Although the Dalai Lama managed to escape to Mongolia, Britain got what it wanted – a new treaty with Tibet signed in 1904.
However, the invasion changed Chinese attitudes towards Tibet in the long run. After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, Tibet managed to regain some form of independence due to decades of chaos.
But in 1950, the Red Army of China entered the country to ‘free’ the Tibetans from ‘slavery’.
When Tibetans were not allowed the autonomy they desired, many, including the Dalai Lama, fled abroad and went into self-imposed exile.
In 1984, construction of the first section of the Qinghai-Tibet railway line was completed, connecting Xinning with Golmud. A small town in the center of Qinghai province that became a center for hippies visiting Lhasa.
When travel writer Paul Theroux traveled the track in the mid-80s, the train was powered by steam and the journey took 30 hours, by the time I traveled in 2018 it had shortened to just seven. There were hours left. Theroux described it as ‘a terrible train’ in his travels. During the Iron Rooster ride, the train ran out of water an hour after the start of the journey, quarrels among passengers, etc.
In contrast, the second class compartment I was in had, in addition to a comfortable berth, overhead nozzles to regulate oxygen levels and prevent altitude sickness. At the end of each carriage was a barrel of boiling hot water in case the tea flask needed to be refilled. I wrote in my diary, “The world has changed, but the Qinghai Desert has not changed.”
Reading Theroux’s travelog as we drove towards the plateau city of Gold, it felt like the book was providing a beautifully animated commentary on the scenery passing through the window. As we drove into the most rugged region of China, villages of mud houses scattered across the rocky plains gave the impression that we were passing through Stone Age settlements.
But the Gollum of today is radically different from the Gollum of Theroux’s time. Instead of a dozen small buildings, a new and clean city that looked as if it had been transported from a factory in Model Town to the plateau. But I couldn’t help but feel that this beautiful city was clearly not suitable for a semi-prosperous middle-class settlement.
After spending a night in Gold, the next afternoon boarded the train known as the ‘Sky Train’ and left for Lhasa.
During the opening ceremony of Gold Station in 2006 (this is when the Lhasa section was opened), Chinese President Hu Jintao called the second section of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway ‘a great achievement in China’s railway construction history’ and ‘ The miracle of the world’s railway history was declared.
Regardless of the Chinese president’s speech, the engineers had indeed accomplished an impossible task.
The challenges of building the remaining 1,200 km of railway line across the so-called Roof of the World were nothing short of a nightmare for any right-thinking railway surveyor.
The winter on the plateau was so severe that Tibet was called the ‘Third Pole’. Simply put, even if you survive golf ball-sized hail or wind gusts strong enough to blow a small child away, you may still need to wash a few fingers from the cold. is
This extreme weather also created serious challenges for the engineers. The biggest problem was the 869,000 square kilometers of permafrost, which, according to Abraham Lustgarten’s book, China’s Great Train, is the largest area of frozen soil outside the South and North Poles.
Permafrost freezes in the winter but transforms into a marshland in the summer. For the engineer connected to this railway line, this meant that the ground could rise or fall by up to 30 centimeters in a year.
Further complicating the problem was the uneven ground, which froze hard in some places and remained soft in others. And furthermore, there was human-induced climate change that was causing the Tibetan Plateau to warm faster than anywhere else.
To cope with this situation, more than 14% of the railway line was built on bridges like those built to cross flowing water.
Despite all these measures, this is the largest continental plate collision zone on the planet and will always be prone to severe earthquakes.
That is why, as soon as my train came into view, I felt a bit disappointed to see an ordinary train. When I got into the car, I saw that the interior of the car was decorated with Tibetan carpets and the walls were decorated with traditional Buddhist motifs.
‘Ni Hao,’ I said, trying to sound familiar to the Tibetans in the car, but only heard a small chuckle in response.
Finding a window seat, I began rereading Riding the Iron Rooster, culminating in Theroux’s road trip from Golmid to Lhasa.
It was a comical tale of a difficult two-day journey in which Theroux was accompanied by the whisper-talking Miss Sun and the incompetent driver Mr. Yu, who became ill at altitude and caused the train to crash.
Although Theroux was brilliantly observant, he could not foresee the future when he wrote that the main reason why Tibet is so undeveloped and in-Chinese is that it is a great place in China without railways. Reaching the Kunlun range is a guarantee that the railway will never reach Lhasa.
The plains of permafrost tundra visible outside the train were slowly disappearing into the evening darkness. I went to bed early without having dinner. Sometime during the night, we crossed the Tanggula Pass, which marks the highest railway in the world at an altitude of 5,702 meters.
The next morning my eyes opened to a cheery-sounding broadcast about railway progress: ‘At night the temperature often drops to minus 20C, so there is a chance of catching a cold when going to the toilet. To solve this problem, the railway company has installed toilets with electrical heaters.
The Chinese are as proud of their SkyTrain as they are of their Great Wall of China or the Three Gorges Dam. It made me wonder why this is so. It was perhaps the proudest part of their history to build giant structures, whether it was the Great Wall of China that was easily crossed by Manchu cavalry, or the Three Gorges Dam that submerged millions of homes, although the reasons for doing it were always different. Be suspicious.
Officially known as ‘China’s Drive West’, the policy was aimed at promoting economic development in the country’s 12 western provinces. It was touted as an alleviation of poverty, and upon its completion in 2006, the railway initially delivered on that promise, adding 2.5 million tourists to the region in the first five months. increased. This resulted in growth above the national average, which revolutionized Lhasa with hotels, paved roads and condominiums, a transformation derided by critics as the ‘second invasion of Tibet’.
But this boom did not last and the Tibet Autonomous Region was the least developed region of China when I passed through it. Apart from economics, it was more reasonable to consider the strategic value of railways. As Tim Marshall, author of Prisoners of Geography, put it in cold, geopolitical terms, ‘If China did not control Tibet, chances were India would try to do so.’
Then there was the role of railways in nation building. Major countries such as the United States and Russia were built of iron roads, most of which were laid by Chinese forges, while domestically, the colonial power of railways was felt when foreign powers swept across China during the 19th century. Lay the tracks.
Yet in the natural scenery outside the window, geopolitics felt like a human-centered thing. The route to Lhasa was through the Chi Cho, a northern tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, through a rugged valley surrounded by black peaks ending in clouds of cotton wool. I realized that it was indeed a ‘stone castle’, which explains to some extent why it was the last medieval city to be modernized.
Lhasa’s appeal to any world traveler was self-evident: its remoteness, its strangeness and, despite the forces of globalization and Sinification, its isolation. It was 3700 km from Beijing and 284 km from Thimphu, the nearest capital of Bhutan. Even with the train, Lhasa was still the most difficult place to get to.
I finally got off my train and felt refreshed instead of tired. But before I had time to take in the Tibetan breeze, a security guard was pointing me to a large white tent where all foreign visitors had to go to register their arrival.
After some time, a red stamp and a signature signaled me that I was now free to move on. But, as the rules require you to book a tour with a registered travel company, freedom doesn’t last long in Lhasa, just the length of Station Four Court, next to which a group of people from the travel company ‘Are you Mr Bird, Thomas?’ asked the cheerful Tibetan.
“Yes, this name is mine.”
“Welcome to Lhasa.”
They put a white silk scarf around my neck, the traditional Tibetan welcome, then put me in a minibus full of strange-looking foreigners. We had a short chat as we headed towards Barkhor, the historical center of Lhasa. Turns out I was the only one who hadn’t arrived by plane.
