The opening of the ‘sky train’ from Beijing to Lhasa in 2006 fulfilled a plan first envisioned 50 years ago by Mao Zedong.

Looking at the planning, execution, and ramifications of the massive Qinghai-Tibet Railway project, Abrahm Lustgarten examines the lives of a handful of people directly affected by this engineering feat, showing what happens when modernity encroaches on isolation.

He follows Chinese engineer Zhang Luxin, who, after 40 years of research, made his mark by bringing the train over mountains that reach heights of 17,000 feet, and across unstable permafrost plateaus. Lustgarten also writes about his Tibetan friend Renzin, who narrowly escaped starvation during the The Great Leap Forward, only to become a struggling shopkeeper, harassed and bullied by Han Chinese officials.

In justifying the railway, Bejing’s said they wanted to “empower and enrich all Tibetan people so that they would feel part of China.” Indeed, the train was lauded for the progress and development it would bring to Tibet, yet most Tibetans have yet to see any benefit materialise from its construction. Instead, their livelihoods were often destroyed as they were ordered from their homes to make way for the tracks, forced to relocate, and in the end excluded from the new boomtown economies that emerged.

Ultimately, Lustgarten’s account of the nationalistic pride and ambition that made the railway a reality, shows how Mao’s determination to bring Tibet’s unique culture and untouched landscape closer to the rest of the nation, ultimately destroyed much of what it tried to expose. It’s left to the reader to decide if that was always the intention.

Holt Paperbacks