onto the already fragile surface vegetation. Between the rail and the road were puddles and pools of melted ice. Other areas were turning into mountain desert. On either side of the track, herds of cows and sheep munched on blotchy patches of grassland near man-made barriers erected to keep the encroaching sand dunes at bay. The loss of grass and topsoil was not just a threat to the beauty of the plateau and the grazing of the cattle; it also accelerated the speed at which the permafrost melted and raised the risk that billions of tons of methane hydrates contained inside the ice would be released into the atmosphere.26 Methane’s greenhouse gas effect is fifty times that of carbon dioxide.
Settlement and modernization had also brought the problem of nondegradable rubbish. Behind each cluster of buildings on the route, such as the small village-garrison of Wudaoliao, was a stinking pile of rotting bags, empty tins, plastic bottles, and gas cans. When I asked my driver how the refuse was disposed of, he laughed. “We leave that job to the wind and the rain and the dogs.”
The rubbish was piling up elsewhere in the mountains along with improved transport links. The problem was notorious at Mount Everest, which is known locally as Chomolungma. Ahead of the Olympics, builders laid a tarmac road to within 20 kilometers of base camp for the torch relay leg up to the world’s highest mountain. The greatest of man’s expeditions in the 1950s was now just a car trip away and was starting to suffer the same problems of any other crowded sightseeing spot. Since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first scaled the mountain on May 29, 1953, there had been more than 4,000 ascents and countless other visitors to the base camps in China and Nepal. Both countries are struggling to deal with the empty beer cans, discarded oxygen bottles, and other refuse left behind. With climate change also posing a threat in the form of meltwater floods, in 2005 Sir Edmund called for Everest to be added to the UN list of endangered heritage sites.
But, on the Chinese side of the mountain at least, economic development took priority. That was clear in the treatment of wildlife. The plateau is home to thousands of species of plants and more than 500 species of birds. The railway runs through three nature reserves: Hoh Xil, Chumarleb, and Soga. Nearby is another, Chang Tang, the second-largest reserve in the world and, at 334,000 square kilometers, more than 50 percent larger than Britain. About a third of Tibet’s lands are protected. They are home to rare wild animals such as the black-necked crane, huge-horned argali sheep, wild yak, white-lipped deer, gazelle, snow leopards, and, of course, the chiru.
Selected as a mascot for the Beijing Olympics, the chiru, a talismanic creature that is actually more goat than antelope, is much in demand for its fine shahtoosh wool. At least three animals have to be killed to produce a single shawl. Despite being listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora since 1979, they are still shot for their fleece. No reliable data exist on their numbers, but there is widespread agreement among scientists that the population dropped precipitously in the 1990s from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. The wildlife zoologist Richard Harris says the poaching was as vital to the local economy as opium cultivation in Afghanistan or coca growing in Colombia.27 Just as in those cases, the blame for the illegal trade ultimately rested with rich Western consumers who buy expensive shahtoosh shawls.
Chiru numbers have recovered somewhat in recent years thanks to strengthened government conservation efforts. But all too often the protected status of the animals is not backed with enforcement. Tibet has one of the lowest levels of nature reserve staff in China.28 Poaching remains rampant. In 2008, one poacher was caught with 400 skins.29 Many more killings go undetected.
Like everything else in Tibet, wildlife conservation is a political issue. One of the biggest acts of defiance in 2006 was the mass burning of animal pelts after the Dalai Lama said he felt ashamed that Tibetans wear clothes made from endangered species.30 The burnings of otter, leopard, tiger, and fox skins became such a symbol of loyalty to the exiled leader that Chinese authorities reacted by ordering Tibetan TV presenters to wear fur during broadcasts.
Peering through a pair of binoculars, our driver saw a chiru far in the distance on the stony plain. He passed the glasses over so I could see the beautiful, funny-looking creature with snowy white hindquarters. It gazed curiously in our direction for a while, then bounded off as soon as we tried to approach.
The chiru is famously shy. Designers of the railway added underpasses to allow the beasts, as well as yaks and wild asses, to migrate without disturbance. The effectiveness of these measures was hotly contested. Tibetan overseas groups claimed the passages were too narrow and animals often panicked and stampeded with fatal results. Nonsense, retorted Chinese scientists, who claimed more than 95 percent of chiru used the passes.
The political sensitivity of the issue was demonstrated in 2006 by an award-winning photograph that appeared to show chiru bounding healthily below a passing train. The harmonious image of Tibetan nature and Chinese technology side by side was selected as one of the photographs of the year by the state broadcaster CCTV. But it was faked. The Xinhua photographer claimed he waited eight days and nights in a bunker for the shot, but it transpired it was knocked up in a few hours using Photoshop software. The harmonious ideal was a computer fabrication.31
Downstream from the glacier and far across an endlessly bleak plain was our destination, the station at Tuotuohe. The biggest town between Golmud and the Tibetan border was the archetypal frontier community, a narrow strip of grubby buildings populated by a few hundred railway workers, soldiers, truck drivers, and the providers of the services they sought: gas stations, restaurants, open-air pool tables, rough beds, and a brothel. The town was such a dot in the middle of nowhere that our government map located its position incorrectly. But that didn’t stop an endless stream of trucks from roaring through on the road that General Mu built, which, until the railway, was the main channel for the manufactured goods flowing into Tibet and the minerals flowing out.
The natural wealth of Tibet was one reason that the region’s Chinese name is Xizang, or “western treasure house.” While road and air were the only forms of transport, it had not been economical to extract or develop these resources. But this would change with the Sky Train.
Minerals also became easier to exploit as the Sky Train cut freight charges by 75 percent, according to the railway ministry. With global commodity prices surging as a result of the growing demands of China’s factories, miners could suddenly see the potential for profit in Tibet’s mountains. A Gansu fluorite miner explained to me that Tibet and Mongolia were the future for his business because reserves elsewhere were fully exploited, while the train made it cheaper to mine on the plateau.
With the transport ministry planning six more lines on the plateau by 2020,32 more of the mineral wealth of Tibet is likely to be freighted to the eastern seaboard. The story of Yugong Yishan is coming closer to being realized. Mountains are being moved, freight car by freight car.
Hydropower is another resource that will probably be developed. The Tibetan Plateau is the water tank of the continent, the source of the Yangtze, Mekong, Yellow, Salween, Brahmaputra, Indus, and Ganges, and other mighty rivers that slake the thirst of at least two billion people who live downstream.33 Until recently it had relatively few dams, though some, such as the one at Yamdrok Tso, are major barriers. Tibetans considered them a defilement of sacred lakes and rivers. The prospect of local opposition and high cost of working in remote areas held back development of other areas. The railway weakens those barriers by making it cheaper and easier to move engineers, materials, and the troops to guard them. The government’s plans for new dams, such as the giant 40,000-megawatt plant at the bend of the Yalong Zangbo (Brahmaputra) and water diversion projects threaten the environmental security of South Asia.34
We stayed overnight in a grimy truckers’ lodge. Over dinner at the Chengdu First Class Restaurant, I was too tired by the journey and the 4,500-meter altitude even to chat. We had reached the place where China’s can-do spirit, the essence of Peak Man, pushed people and the environment to the limit. But the population was swelling here too.
Close to the southern bank of the river, new homes had been built for Tibetan nomads relocated from the plains. There were also fresh residents at the local weather-monitoring station, where three recent graduates had just arrived from their urban homes on the coast. They had already noticed the impact of climate change in their measurements. The cold season in Tuotuohe now began in early October, instead of late September. The rise in temperature was prompting different avalanche patterns.
But the graduates’ more immediate concern was how to pass three years in the middle of nowhere. “We play mah-jongg and I’ve started fishing,” said one young scientist. “We’ll have to be imaginative or we’ll die of boredom here.”
Many other migrants were having to adjust. Demographic changes follow railways.35 The number of tourists visiting the Tibet Autonomous Region more than doubled to 4 million within two years of train services to Lhasa. The government was encouraging further migration. As part of its “Go West” policy to develop
