After 16
days and 7,456 miles, the locomotive’s arrival heralds the dawn of a new
commercial era
 |
| The East Wind freight train prepares for its journey at Yiwu station in Zhejiang province of China. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images |
When the
East Wind locomotive rumbles into east London this week, it will be at the head
of 34 carriages full of socks, bags and wallets for London’s tourist souvenir
shops, as well as the dust and grime accumulated through eight countries and
7,456 miles.
The train
will be the first to make the 16-day journey from Yiwu in west China to
Britain, reviving the ancient trading Silk Road route and shunting in a new era
of UK-China relations.
Due to
arrive on Wednesday, the train will have passed through China, Kazakhstan,
Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France before crossing under the
Channel and arriving in the east end of London at Barking rail freight
terminal.
Faster than
a ship, cheaper than a plane, the East Wind won’t be quite the same train that
left Yiwu on 2 January. Differing rail gauges in countries along the route mean
a single locomotive cannot travel the whole route. But the journey still marks
a new departure in the 21st-century global economy. The new train, which will
start to run weekly while demand is tested, is part of China’s One Belt, One
Road policy – designed to open up the old Silk Road routes and bring new trade
opportunities, said Prof Magnus Marsden, an anthropologist at Sussex
University’s School of Global Studies, who has been studying the trading
patterns in Yiwu. China Railway has already begun rail services to 14 European
cities, including Madrid and Hamburg. As a result, Yiwu’s markets are now loaded
with hams, cheese and wine from Spain and German beer is available on every
corner.
“It’s a new
economic geography,” he said. “This is the first train to the UK, but very much
part of a new type of commercial route. The commodities are small. It’s not the
big corporates who will be using this train, so it’s very much in the tradition
of the Silk Road, giving opportunities for those who are in fact the inheritors
of those ancient traders today.” Yiwu is a gigantic bazaar, he said, where
traders from all over the world congregate. The goods brought to Britain by the
East Wind are not as exotic as the peacocks and gemstones that were once
transported along the Silk Road, which ran through Europe and Eurasia’s
historical dynasties and empires. The trading route, thought to have been
established in around 200BC, brought the west textiles, exotic foods, paper
making – and probably the Black Death.
Everything
from chairs to illicit drugs were sent back the other way. On one occasion
China threatened Queen Victoria that it would stop exporting her favourite
rhubarb to England if she didn’t do something about the British opium trade.
“Yiwu made its name internationally as a city in which traders could buy
affordable commodities in bulk,” said Marsden. “The city’s early trade was
mostly with markets in Asia, Africa, Latin America and eastern Europe. From the
sprawling container markets of the former Soviet Union to the bazaars of the
Middle East, commodities purchased in Yiwu have both made and unmade people’s
lives. These products have contributed to the demise of local industries, yet
have also had a hand in the resurrection of great trading cities that had
fallen into decline, the Black Sea port of Odessa in Ukraine, or Sulaymaniyah
in Iraq being such examples.”
Today
Yiwu’s streets are among the most cosmopolitan in the world, full of traders
from Colombia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan, India, Syria, Angola and
Ukraine, and could now be attracting a few from the UK as well.
In Barking
there is great excitement over the arrival of the East Wind, the name of which
references the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, who famously said: “The
east wind will prevail over the west wind.”
“The new
service has a very quick transit time,” operations director, Mike White, told
the Railway Gazette. “We believe this is going to change the way a lot of
forwarders and shippers view their imports and exports for China.”
No comments:
Post a Comment