Earlier this week there was a flurry of coverage from state media about a potential expansion of the Qinghai-Tibet highway up to the Nepalese border, which would include a massive tunnel beneath the Himalayas. The sub-Everest tunnel is never going to happen, though, because of course it isn't.
The price of such a tunnel could be an eye-bleeding "100 million yuan per kilometer, and that is probably an underestimate," according to Xinhua, as quoted by the South China Morning Post.
Even if money were no object, it is hard to think of a more difficult engineering task. Drilling through Everest would, to put it lightly, be a complete construction clusterfuck - even building the Tibet-Qinghai railway resulted in more than 100 workers' deaths, and that was a cakewalk compared to this plan.
Besides having to deal with, you know, drilling through the biggest mountains on earth, the workers would also face issues with a lack of oxygen at such heights.
If accomplished, SCMP reports, "the railway would significantly increase trade and tourism between China and Nepal."
That sounds impressive, because it uses the word "significantly." But we're not talking about the trans-Pacific highway here (see: another completely bonkers Chinese construction pipe dream) connecting to two biggest markets in the world. We're talking about a boost in China/Nepal trade, which is a small enough topic that its Wikipedia page could literally be printed, back and front, on a single sheet of paper. (And yes, that's our metric for matters of global importance.)
In other words, all of those English-language publications that typed up a storm about this railway deal were just basing their information on a state media article that looks like someone just wrote because it sounded like a fun thing to do. Us included.
0 User Comments