Infrastructure investment opens up remote Qinghai

After 13 hours in total, as the sun was setting, we finally reached Golmud. I was dropped off at the only hotel accepting foreign travelers, who were few at that time. Indeed, I saw no other Westerners there. Dining in local Sichuan, Tibetan or Lanzhou beef noodle restaurants, I initially received incredulous stares that would soon transform into welcoming grins.

Located in south central Qaidam Basin at an elevation of 2,809 meters, Golmud was at a crossroads of ancient routes, long and lonely tracks forming part of the Silk Road network. In the middle of October 1997, daytime sunshine brought relative warmth. But after sunset, the air quickly turned cold. The city averages 3,096 hours of sunshine annually, and humidity hovers around 32 percent with around only 28 days of rain, mostly falling in summer.

Golmud stood at the center of Haixi Mongol and Tibetan autonomous prefecture. With a population of around 270,000, Golmud was granted official city status June 14, 1980. Permanent settlement noticeably grew starting from the 1950s, the area having previously been visited mainly by nomadic herders. (Its name in Mongolian refers to “a place abundant in rivers”.) Golmud developed as a base for surveyors and engineers working on the feasibility of constructing a railway to Lhasa from Xining.

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