One Belt, one Road, The New Silk Road: The beginning

In this second entrance, we will continue exploring one of the most spectacular initiatives in this century, the One belt, One road project.

In words of Swedish explorer Sven Hedin taking about the Silk Road: "It can be said without exaggeration that this artery through the whole of the old world is the longest and from a cultural-historical standpoint the most significant connecting link between peoples and continents that has ever existed on earth"

In the 21st century China want to emulate the old Silk Road, but instead of camels and wooden boats, trains and gigantic vessels will be responsible for half of the worlds trade.

For those of you that are not familiar with this initiative yet, the below video is a short, but very informative version of this project:

For those of you that want to know more, watch the next video, you will have to bear the lack of subtitles, but it´s worth it.

It will frame the context to better understand the importance of this project and how China´s development in the last 35 years has made it possible.

This is probably one of the most colosal initiatives in world´s history, one belt one road will change the world as we know it, and I will be  showing you in the next posts how this humongous project is taking shape.

One Belt, one Road, The New Silk Road: The first train

This post will probably be the first part of a series of post related to the gigantic Chinese project “One road, one Belt”

In this first entry we will focus in the first string of the project the new rail routes.

Until not too long ago the only two options available to transport Chinese products to Europe were take an ocean bound route, which although cheap can be very slow, or use an air carrier that is considerably faster, but also much more expensive.

A third way was unlocked when the Chinese government launched a rail freight service between China and Western Europe.

This line will connect Beijing and London, making it the first direct rail link between the two cities.

The freight will span 7456 miles (12000 km) of railways crossing Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium, France and the UK.

The route is actually not new at all, it´s part o the old Silk Road, which commenced more than 2000 years ago, through which Chinese silk caravans carried wears to Europe and Africa. Now Beijing is aiming to resurrect this historic trade route by using rail power.

This new plan is part of Chinese president Xi Jinping´s project to improve the country´s trade links and revive the ancient Silk Road route.

This new route also comes at a particularly well time for the UK, with the government of Theresa May currently sourcing the world for trade deals in anticipation of a departure from the EU.

The first cargo carrying 4 million worth of goods arrived in London on the 8th of January after an eighteen day journey that was as much an engineering challenge as a logistical problem with different types of rail track in different countries meaning the same train can´t travel the whole route and so the containers have to be removed and reloaded onto different carriages at several stages of the journey.