How technology tamed ice-covered mountain

Before the Chinese thought of building a rail line to connect Qinghai Province in the northwest of China to Lhasa, the idea would have been fantasy.

The train was to run at the highest altitudes in the world, on treacherous and unstable ground, through thin air where even breathing is difficult. But the science fiction idea has taken the shape of steel in a few years and is now a technological marvel.

The rail line does not connect just space. In the last many years some parts of China have moved into the modern age and have made up for the centuries they lost when the rest of the world advanced economically and technologically. But the Tibet Autonomous Region still lagged behind, handicapped by geography and the limitations of technology.

Mountain-locked on all four sides by the world's highest ranges the Himalayas, the Karakoram range, the Kunlun Mountains and the Hengduan range the Tibetan plateau continued to remain isolated from the world. The isolation made it mysterious and the development of a singular and religion-based culture made it exotic.

Though Tibet changed too, physical access was still extremely arduous.

Traditionally, the plateau, all deserts and grasslands, had no roads at all. The construction of internal roads increased connectivity within the region, but to the outside world it was still Shangri-la. The isolation is perhaps the reason for the Tibetans' obsession with time rituals, like the kalachakra.

Therefore, the train that left on its 29-hour journey to Lhasa was a journey between two time zones too. It sliced into a zone where prayer wheels moved slowly in slower time and prayer flags fluttered in rarefied air for centuries.

When it made its first ever journey on July 1, it carried a load of this worldly excitement into Lhasa. It was President Hu Jintao himself who flagged off the train, on the 85th anniversary day of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. That signalled the importance the Chinese attach to the train link.

All rail lines are lifelines of economies. The cost of transport of goods will be reduced to 25 percent of what it is now, and it is expected that revenues from tourism will double in the next three years.

Zhao Guoqiang, senior official with Northwest China's Gansu provincial government, said the Chinese were also expecting the rail link to increase trade with India. The taming of the mountains is a miracle. The building of the 1,142-kilometer stretch from Golmud in Qinghai Province to Lhasa took just five years.

Mao Zedong in his revolutionary writings had given the parable of an old man who moved a mountain by working on it, shovel by shovel, for decades. His successors didn't have to move the mountains away but move some ingenuity through them, sleeper by sleeper.

The most challenging part of the work was on the oxygen-deficient, earthquake-prone terrain along the Tanggula Pass, which is over 5,000 meters above sea level and a part of the Kunlun mountain range.

The area is known for its permafrost (perennially frozen ground) which melts in the sun and refreezes quickly, posing the danger of subsidence.

Chinese engineers solved the problem by developing a technique through which coolants are driven into the earth to prevent the melting of the snow. Chinese officials dismiss doubts about the effectiveness of the technology and the damage the rail line causes to the pristine natural environment of Tibet.

All over the mountainous terrains, world class high-ways are being built, power and telecom towers are being erected and hotels are coming up. One cannot miss the confidence too.

The author Ananthampilli Vasudevan Sankaranarayanan Namboodiri is a senior editor and reporter with the Indian newspaper Deccan Herald

source:China Daily