When Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev visited Beijing this week, he detoured to Tianjin, the port city near the capital. He was there on a critical mission: inspecting the high-speed railway line that links Beijing and Tianjin.
Thanks to China, Kazakhstan will soon have a high-speed rail link of its own, one that will stretch more than 1,000 kilometres between Astana and Almaty.
It’s a symbolic shift, because it wasn’t so long ago that it was Russian engineers who toiled away to lay rails across the steppes of Central Asia. Their legacy is still evident in the Kazakh rail system, which conforms to the Russian rail gauge instead of the Chinese gauge.
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