TIBET: The railway already stands with the Three Gorges Dam as modern China's equivalent of the Great Wall, writes Fintan O'Toole
The train was entering the last phase of its two-day journey from Beijing to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. Most of the passengers, stacked like battery hens in the six shelves of the so-called "hard bed" compartments, had given up rushing from side to side to photograph yet another herd of wild yaks, yet another awe-inspiring snow-capped mountain, yet another dizzying gorge.
Some were lying slumped against the walls, with one end of the clear tubes that had been distributed the day before stuck into the compartment's oxygen outlet and the other stuck up their nostrils, hoping that the pure gas would blow away the headaches and nausea of altitude sickness.
The train's PA system had given up playing the stirring patriotic melodies that had provided a soundtrack to the heroic scenery hurtling past the windows and was now belting out The Power of Love, I Will Always Love You, Can't Get You Out of My Head and even Hit Me, Baby, One More Time, as if these were hymns to the shining modernity of the new railroad.
We stopped for a few minutes at Naqu, in the middle of nowhere, on a vast, almost empty stretch of grassland. I got out on to the platform to stretch my legs.
Three young Tibetan guys ran excitedly towards me. They were dressed up in their best clothes, two of them in red jackets, one in a dark, formal suit topped off with a red baseball cap. They had been taking pictures of the train and when they saw me, one of only two exotic Westerners among the 900 passengers, they were excited.
They asked if they could possibly have their picture taken with me beside the train. They had travelled 50 miles just to see it, and a foreigner would complete the picture.
The whole encounter seemed rather odd until it struck that, of course, they had never seen a train before. They were experiencing something that most Europeans did in the middle of the 19th century - the pure wonder of the railway. The train from Qinghai to Tibet, the first line ever to cross these huge, high, apparently impenetrable plateaux, still makes the nomadic herders who live on them stop and stare as it passes.
But behind the wonder, there is also the knowledge that the walls are coming down, that the great physical barriers that kept Tibet isolated for much of its history have been breached once and for all.
A huge sign on the motorway outside Lhasa reads: "Tibet Railway: Happiness, Hope, Harmony and Golden Opportunity."
The hyperbole may be obvious, but the rhetoric is nonetheless revealing. The 1,956 kilometre track that links Tibet to Qinghai, and thus to every part of China, was never going to be just a means of transport or even an extraordinary technical achievement.
It was not for nothing that the date chosen for the launch of the first train by Chinese president Hu Jintao, July 1st, was also the 85th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
The trains may carry a heavy load of cargo, but the railway is even more heavily freighted with symbolism. Like the Pacific Railroad that joined California to the American east coast in the 1860s, the Qinghai-Tibet railway carries a grandiose message: this country is going places and one of them is to a west that it definitively claims as its own. As it is extended westwards and southwards over the next decade, the railway will take a tangible, technological China all the way to the border with India.
As an image of old-fashioned, heroic modernity, the rails that drive through mountains, over rushing rivers and across huge stretches of tundra could hardly be more impressive.
When President Hu hailed it on its launch as "a magnificent feat" and "a great miracle", he was not greatly exaggerating.
The track is the highest in the world: it reaches 5,072 metres at the Tangulla Pass, and 960 kilometres of it is above 4,000 metres, where the oxygen content of the air is little over half that at sea level.
A huge stretch, almost 550 kilometres, runs across permanently frozen earth, demanding specially-developed cooling mechanisms to keep the track stable.
(A task that will probably prove to be a permanent struggle: the impact of global warming has already led to shifts in the ground and consequently to cracks in the railway's structure.)
As a source of national pride, the railway already stands with the Three Gorges Dam as contemporary China's equivalent of the Great Wall. President Hu described it as proof that Chinese people "are ambitious, self-confident and capable of standing amongst the world's advanced nations", and this is certainly a large part of the massive enthusiasm for the project in China.
Last week, the Beijing Language and Culture University released a list of the phrases most commonly used in the Chinese newspapers so far this year.
"Qinghai-Tibet railway" is challenging "World Cup" for the top slot. Demand for places on the train (which range in price from €23 for a one-way seat to €81 for a "soft-sleeper" in a four-bed compartment) is such that scalpers have been able to charge up to €200 for a ticket.
The impact on tourism in Tibet is dramatic. A daily average of 4,400 people arrived in Lhasa by train throughout July. While Tibet had 600,000 visitors in the first half of the year, before the train started to run, it is expected to have two million in the second half - just half a million fewer than the indigenous population.
The most famous attraction, the Potala Palace in Lhasa, seat of the exiled Dalai Lama, has increased its permitted number of visitors from 1,500 a day to 2,300 - and the limit is still reached by mid-morning.
Watching the influx, Tibetans fear that it presages a more permanent invasion and that settlers from the majority Han ethnic group will follow in ever-larger numbers.
The authorities are adamant that this will not happen. Wu Yingjie, vice-chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, told journalists recently that "Tibet's unique natural conditions make it impossible for Han people and people from other ethnic groups to settle down here."
Whether or not there is such an influx, a more important reality may be that the railway itself is the spearhead of a project for modernising Tibet and integrating it with the Chinese economy. When President Hu hailed the launch of the railway as "a historic opportunity for the economic and social development in Qinghai Province and Tibet Autonomous Region", he was reflecting a basic Chinese perception of Tibet as a backward region that needs to be pushed into a modernity that the rest of China is rapidly approaching.
The agenda may be clear, but it is not without its interesting complications. One is environmental. The Chinese government is acutely sensitive to the need to be seen to care for Tibet's fragile ecosystems.
All official statements on the railway have stressed the money and ingenuity that has gone into ensuring that the track and infrastructure does as little damage as possible to the permafrost, swamps and wildlife.
Tunnels and passageways to allow the migration of wild yaks and endangered Tibetan antelopes are prominent features of the line, and, though no long-term studies have been done, the immediate evidence seems to suggest that they are working.
What may be important is that this concern is not entirely altruistic: all the major rivers of China (and indeed of southeast Asia), including the Yellow river and the Yangzi, whose waters irrigate much of China's productive land, rise in the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau. In an era already facing the uncertainties of climate change, China simply can't afford to risk a serious disruption of Tibet's ecosystems.
The other limitation is the paradox of tourism. Official policy, made manifest in the railway, is to encourage tourism as Tibet's most obvious economic asset and to double revenue from this source by 2010.
But tourists, including Chinese tourists, aren't interested in a Tibet that's just another part of a modernising China.
The region's "unique selling point" is its difference - its nomadic pastoralists, its aura of inaccessibility, above all its living Buddhist culture with its monasteries and palaces, monks and nuns. In other words, the very things that official policy has tended to see as manifestations of backwardness and obstacles to Tibet's integration into China.
Tourism, however limited and artificial it may seem, is already providing tens of thousands of Chinese visitors with a crash course in Tibetan history and culture, and over time this exercise in mass education may have an impact of its own.
However efficient and impressive it may be, the line to Tibet may not go straight to a predictable destination.
Tomorrow: The relationship with Beijing.