China opens world's highest railway to Tibet

China opened the first train service to Tibet on the world’s highest railway today, a controversial engineering marvel meant to bind the restive Himalayan region to China.

President Hu Jintao cut a giant red ribbon at a nationally-televised ceremony in the western city of Golmud as the first train left for the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Musicians in Chinese and Tibetan costumes banged drums and cymbals as the train pulled out.

“This is a magnificent feat by the Chinese people, and also a miracle in world railway history,” Hu told an audience that included yellow-helmeted workers who built the line. He said it showed that China’s people were “ambitious, self-confident and capable of standing among the world’s advanced nations”.

The £2.3bn (€3.3bn) railway is part of the communist government’s efforts to develop poor, restive areas in China’s west and bind them more closely to the country’s booming east.

Activists complain that the railway will bring an influx of Chinese migrants, damaging Tibet’s fragile ecology and diluting its unique Buddhist society. They say most of its economic benefits will go to migrants from the east.

The 710-mile line crosses some of the world’s most forbidding terrain, climbing mountain passes up to 16,500 feet high and passing over ground that is frozen all year round.

The train’s specially-designed cars have oxygen supplies to help passengers cope with the thin air and window filters to protect them from ultraviolet rays. High-tech cooling systems are to keep permafrost under the railbed frozen and stable.

The first 16-carriage train left Golmud with 600 passengers for the journey up the treeless Tibetan plateau to Lhasa.

Minutes later, state television showed a second train leaving the Tibetan capital for Golmud. A third train was due to leave Beijing later for Lhasa.

Yesterday three women from the US, Canada and Britain were detained after unfurling a banner at Beijing’s main train station reading: “China’s Tibet Railway, Designed to Destroy.”

Others planned to protest today outside Chinese embassies abroad.

Chinese officials acknowledge that few Tibetans are employed by the railway but say that number should increase. The government also says it is taking precautions to protect the environment.

The railway is projected to help double tourism revenues in Tibet by 2010 and reduce transport costs for goods by 75%, according to the government’s Xinhua News Agency.

Until now, goods going to and from Tibet have been trucked over mountain highways that are often blocked by landslides or snow, making trade prohibitively expensive.

Communist troops marched into Tibet in 1950, and Beijing says the region has been Chinese territory for centuries. But Tibet was effectively independent for much of that time.

Chinese officials have wanted to build a railway to Tibet for decades but were put off by the engineering challenges.

The project was launched in earnest in 2001 after engineers decided they could deal with the Tibetan plateau’s high altitude and temperature extremes. In some places, crews building the line worked at such high altitudes that they were forced to breathe bottled oxygen.

The railway’s highest station will be in Nagqu, a town at 14,850 feet in the plateau’s rolling grasslands.

According to Xinhua, the highest point on the line is 16,737 feet, which the government says is a world record.