In the summer of 2006, the Chinese government fulfilled a fifty-year plan to build a railway into Tibet. Since Mao Zedong first envisioned it, the line had grown into an imperative, a critical component of China's breakneck expansion and the final maneuver in strengthening China's grip over this remote and often mystical frontier, which promised rich resources and geographic supremacy over South Asia.
Through the lives of the Chinese and Tibetans swept up in the project, Fortune magazine writer Abrahm Lustgarten explores the "Wild West" atmosphere of the Chinese economy today. He follows innovative Chinese engineer Zhang Luxin as he makes the train's route over the treacherous mountains and permafrost possible (for now), and the tenacious Tibetan shopkeeper Rinzen, who struggles to hold on to his business in a boomtown that increasingly favors the Han Chinese. As the railway the highest and steepest in the worldextends to Lhasa, and China's "Go West" campaign delivers waves of rural poor eager to make their fortunes, their lives and communities fundamentally change, sometimes for good, sometimes not.
Lustgarten's book is a timely, provocative, and absorbing first-hand account of the Chinese boom and the promise and costs of rapid development on the country's people..

China's Great Train, Lustgarten, Times Books, Hardcover, 2008, 305 Pages, $26.00

Abrahm Lustgarten is a contributing writer for Fortune magazine and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant for international reporting. His articles have appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, Outside, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic Adventure, Salon, and many other publications, and in 2003 he was awarded the Horgan Prize for excellence in science reporting. He splits his time between New York City and Oregon.

	Contents: CHINA'S GREAT TRAIN
	PART l: A FIFTY-YEAR AMBITION
1.	Now Is the Time	3
2.	A Sometime Buddhist	25
3.	A Bigger Stage	47
4.	Stray Dogs	70
	PART ll: GO WEST
5.	Moving Heaven and Earth	99
6.	Free Tibet	116
7.	Under a Han Sun	143
8.	The Gambler	160
	PART lll: TREASURE HOUSE
9.	The Race to Reach Lhasa	185
10.	Paradise Rebuilt	205
11.	When the Wang Family Came to Town	229
12.	Hu's West	252
	Epilogue	274
	Notes	279
	Bibliography	289
	Acknowledgments	294
	Index	297