But modern ships are powered by 110,000 horsepower engines and carry up to 20,000 containers. Today, trains through Khorgos haul more than 80 standard shipping containers and stretching a half-mile long. The ancient Silk Road faded in importance in the 1700s as more sophisticated ships began plying sea routes crammed with booty. “Security is the most important challenge facing Belt and Road,” says Zhu Feng, dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Nanjing University.Įconomic questions also plague many aspects of the initiative. “In the winter I would hunt wild turkey in the summer I picked berries. “Things were better before,” says a Uighur taxi driver in Khorgos, whose name TIME has withheld for his own security. In the especially restive south, Uighurs must secure official permission just to travel to neighboring villages. It’s China’s only province without 4G cell-phone coverage-deliberately held back to impede the download of jihadi propaganda, say local officials. At the city’s central bazaar, soldiers stand next to armored cars with bayonets affixed to assault rifles, as lambs are carried bleating and blinking past trays of mutton into butcher shops. To take a train at the Urumqi’s railway station requires negotiating four ranks of X-ray machines and metal detectors. Riots in the provincial capital Urumqi in 2009 left 197 dead, according to official figures. A total of 3,500 miles of the ancient Silk Road passes through this Alaska-sized territory, where the Taklamakan’s dunes to the south are separated from a lush northern prairie by a central spine of meringue-peaked mountains.īut Xinjiang is also China’s most volatile region, prone to periodic convulsions of strife from a predominantly ethnic Uighur Muslim population that feels marginalized and even persecuted under Beijing’s rule. Today, the Taklamakan fills part of China’s westernmost autonomous region of Xinjiang, which borders seven Central and South Asian nations and is thus the central hub for Belt and Road’s land portion. Lying just 100 miles from the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility-the farthest point on earth from any ocean-Khorgos remains one of the most remote spots on earth Khorgos sits on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, nicknamed the “Sea of Death.” Herodotus wrote in his Histories of griffins guarding golden treasure at the desert’s craggy northern extreme, and of the North Wind gushing from a mountain cave here. Guo says 2,050 cargo trains passed by Khorgos last year, and the goal for 2017 is 5,000. It’s the world’s longest international freight line, broadly following the path of the old Silk Road caravans that lugged pistachios, ivory and dates to eager markets in the West. The scale of the challenge is evident in Khorgos, through which trains now chug on a 7,000-mile journey from 27 Chinese manufacturing hubs to 11 cities in Europe. ![]() Not since the hordes of Genghis Khan galloped west in the 13th century have such sweeping transnational ambitions emanated from China, though instead of ashes and sun-bleached bones, this time the invaders plan to leave harbors, pipelines and high-speed rail in its wake. A new $7.3 billion pipeline from Turkmenistan will bring China an extra 15 billion cubic meters of gas annually. ![]() There’s the $480 million Lamu deep-sea port in Kenya, which will eventually be connected via road, railway and pipeline to landlocked South Sudan and Ethiopia and right across Africa to Cameroon’s port of Douala. A total of 900 separate projects have been earmarked at a cost of $900 billion, according to the China Development Bank. A maritime “road” links coastal Chinese cities via a series of ports to Africa and the Mediterranean. The economic land “belt” takes cargo, in large part via Khorgos, through Eurasia. Formerly known as One Belt One Road, it’s a rekindling of the ancient Silk Road through a staggeringly ambitious plan to build a network of highways, railways and pipelines linking Asia via the Middle East to Europe and south through Africa. Khorgos is a linchpin in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. “Today, the ground of Khorgos is mud,” says Guo Jianbin, deputy director of the Khorgos Economic Development Zone administration committee, accenting his words with a booted stamp.
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