The Importance of Roads from Yunnan to Tibet

Over the past years, and with an additional push from the central government as part of the 13th Five-Year plan, Shangri-La County in Yunnan province has been able to achieve the impressive goal of hardening all the country roads including all village roads of the county by 2020, the national deadline for poverty alleviation projects. In total, between 2,000 and 3,000 km roads have been hardened in Shangri-La County alone, a very high achievement. Local people can now use the roads easily for both business and personal matters. This project has improved the livelihood of local people dramatically. Besides the opportunity to sell agricultural products to a wider scope of customers in larger areas, they can also access jobs in other parts of the county. The local government will continue doing the maintenance to keep all roads in great conditions.

The Yunnan-Tibet Road construction started back in 1957 and it was built along the Tea-Horse Ancient Road. This impressive road goes through some of the highest mountains in China and its highest pass stands at over 4,000m above sea level. Due to the challenging environment shaping the whole region, this has been a very difficult project from beginning to end. At the start of the construction, since there were no specialized tools available until the beginning of the 2000’s, all the work was done manually, and bombing was used to break the mountain to make way for the hardened road, which made the work extremely dangerous for the workers and local people due to the landslides that can be caused when using this kind of methods. This finalization of the entire Yunnan-Tibet Road after several decades of intensive and hard work is a tremendous achievement resulting in amazing high quality roads winding through the mountains and rivers, an easier life for local people as well as many more opportunities and exchanges.