Train 27, Now Arriving Tibet, in a 'Great Leap West'

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Beijing-Lhasa Railway: a 'Great Leap West'
After rolling under snow-covered peaks and crossing 2,500 miles, the first train to travel from Beijing to Lhasa on the world's highest railway arrived in Tibet on July 3.

John Liu, a Gaithersburg, Md., resident and National Institutes of Health genetic biologist visiting his native China, suggested that the changes lamented by Tibetan nationalists are largely the inevitable price of progress and that the modern world will close in on Tibet no matter what the Chinese government does.

"They will change anyway," said Liu, one of the few tourists who had snagged a ticket on the first Tibet-bound train. "You can't keep people the way they were 1,000 years ago."

Train 27 took Liu and fellow passengers to a peak of 16,640 feet above sea level, surpassing by more than 650 feet the Peruvian route over the Andes, now the world's second-highest railway. At 60 mph, the run is faster than those of most Chinese trains, and the cars, built by Bombardier, based in Canada, are more luxurious than most here.

The price of a second-class sleeper from Beijing to Lhasa was set at just under $100. But a Canadian firm, Rail Partners, has announced plans to run luxury cars over the line at $1,000 a night beginning in 2008, complete with en suite bathrooms and an all-you-can- drink service. The target clientele, according to Rail Partners vice president Ivor Warburton, is mainly wealthy foreign tourists, but also China's newly rich.

President Hu Jintao, who once served as Tibet's party secretary, cut the ribbon Saturday on the first train to traverse the new section of track from Golmud, a garrison town at the base of the Kun Luns, to Lhasa. As have his lieutenants, he emphasized that Chinese engineers have gone to great lengths to preserve the environment and wildlife along the way. The Railway Ministry announced it spent more than $900 million on bridges to allow safe passage for wildlife and on structures to guarantee the permafrost would not be overly heated as the train roars by.

An analysis prepared by the U.S.-based International Campaign for Tibet said the main threat was not to animals but to the region's 2.5 million residents and the desire for more autonomy represented by the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in Dharamsala, India.

Tibet for centuries has drifted in and out of Chinese control. Under the Dalai Lama, a spiritual as well as temporal leader, it ran its own affairs for years during the first half of the 20th century, when China was in turmoil. But Beijing's military forces reimposed Chinese control in 1950, and the Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas. After years of pushing for renewed independence, at times with covert backing from the United States, the Dalai Lama more recently has sought to renew relations with Chinese authorities and return to Tibet on the basis of autonomy under Chinese rule.

But Chinese authorities, while seeking to soften relations with the Buddhist religion, have continued to regard the Dalai Lama as a separatist and his followers in Tibet as subversives. Hu, when he was party secretary here, presided over the imposition of martial law after a series of pro-independence protests in 1989. Last month, the analysis pointed out, Hu named as Tibet's new party secretary Zhang Qingli, who previously served as commander of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which is responsible for promoting Han Chinese immigration into Xinjiang.