New Highest Railway Opens All-Round Inter-Regional Link Prospects

July 26, 2006
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By DR. UPENDRA GAUTAM

China naturally integrates with South Asia by mountains and rivers – specifically speaking the Himalayan range, and the integrity of flow of the Ganga , the Brahmputra and the Sutlej rivers. Now a new high-tech link is being developed. On 1 st of July, the 85 th anniversary day of the Chinese Communist Party, the first regular railway service to Lhasa was flagged off from Beijing . Covering 4062 KM, the train reached Lhasa after 48 hours. Thus, the railway service became yet another significant steel way to further solidly unify remote Tibet with the rest of the mainland China . This train service started its return trip from Lhasa to Beijing on 4 th of July. Indeed, it was 4th of July in 1837 when Grand Junction Railway, world’s first long-distance railway, was opened between Birmingham and Liverpool in the UK . It was on this very day in 1886 when the First scheduled Canadian trans-continental train arrived in Port Moody, British Columbia. It was the 4th of July, too, of 1947 when “Indian Independence Bill” was presented before British House of Commons, enforcing bifurcation of British India into two sovereign countries – India and Pakistan, two of the eventual major destinations of the Chinese railway. Surely one cannot forget that July 4 is the US Day of Independence from the British imperialist rule as well.

The reference to the American Day of Independence is being made here because some people assume that the West, led by the US , was against the subject of rail service on the ground of environmental concern. But practical people-to-people cooperation, for example from Canada, indicates that component of the Chinese Himalayan rail service utilized high-tech Canadian products, and people of these countries are more than willing to have a ride on this heavenly train sooner than latter.

No doubt, the rail service travels through the highest elevation of 5072 meters from the sea level. It is the world’s highest altitude and longest plateau railway-extending 1956 km from Qinghai province’s capital Xining to Lhasa in the south-west.

“The highest altitude” feature marks out China ‘s another great sense – the sublime sense of struggle. About 550 km of this railway track run on permanently frozen earth. It was precisely because of the instability of the earth the Chinese scientists and technologists had to wait for so many years to link high Himalayan region of Tibet with the rest of the country as they required to innovate the way out. Now the railway uses 1686-meter long Kunlung mountain tunnel, the world’s longest tunnel built on permanently frozen earth. The train speed on the permanently frozen earth is designed to be 100 km/hour while this will reach to 120 km/hour on normal track. In such an ecological context, the phenomenon of global warming is certainly a threat to Tibet railway. Chinese Academy of Sciences had long back asked for cooperation among scientists of China , India and Nepal for research on the effects of global warming on melting of snow in the high Himalayan ecology.

It will be fitting to pay respect here to Prof. Wang Hongwei of Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies , Beijing who long before visualized several railway connections between China and parts of South and Central Asia . His visualized connections included Yunnan-Myanmar and Bangladesh and Tibet-Nepal and the heartland of India (that is, India ‘s Bihar , UP, Delhi , Punjab and Haryana provinces). Even though the railway has now only reached Lhasa , it has brought Nepal closer to Asia ‘s Far East (that is, Japan , Republic of Korea and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ) via Shanghai . Now the Nepali students, tradesmen, workers and tourists can go for their mission as well as long haul visit to various directions through Lhasa .

And Lhasa these days is abuzz with standardization of new lexicon or gamut of words/phrases relating to train services as they did not exist in the Tibetan language before. And one of these phrases is “Mei Kuo Er” or “railway” though “Ri Li” can also be used in Tibetan oral expression for the train. We delightfully appreciate the Chinese and Tibetan scientists, technicians and labor for bringing the new railway culture to the roof or the world, and thus bringing it closer to Nepal , a nation which shares with Tibet the most extensive social, cultural and economic ties.

(This article is based on statement delivered by Dr. Gautam, General Secretary, China Study Center, Nepal on 14 July 2006 in a talk program organized to celebrate historic commencement of regular railway service in Tibet Autonomous Region of China)