Highway drives Metog's economic engine

When Kelsang Dekyi traveled out of Metog county in the Xizang autonomous region via a highway tunnel through the Galongla Mountain for the first time, she did not just see light at the end of the tunnel, but a brighter future for her people.

The tunnel, a key part of the Zhamog-Metog Highway connecting Metog with neighboring Bomi county's Zhamog township, looks like a tiny wormhole against a backdrop of mountains covered in snow even in June.

"The zigzagging old roads, which are abandoned, were the only means of getting in and out of Metog," said the 48-year-old. "All people, young and old, had to make the dangerous journey that took days on foot in the old days."

Frequent natural disasters, such as avalanches, landslides and mudslides, often blocked the old roads to the county. This extreme isolation earned Metog its name, which translates to "secret lotus" in the Tibetan language, according to Kelsang Dekyi, who now serves as the vice-principal of Wanquan Primary School in Metog.

Constructing modern roads to Metog, which lies on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River and on the southern slope of the Himalayas, represents one of the most punishing engineering challenges in China due to highly unstable geological conditions and volatile mountain weather. After several attempts were thwarted over decades, a 117-kilometer highway finally opened on Oct 31,2013, making Metog the last county in China to be connected to the national highway network.

The breakthrough required an initial capital investment of 950 million yuan ($140 million), a massive engineering gamble that has since yielded staggering economic returns. In 2012, the year before the highway opened, Metog's local economy was largely dormant, with a GDP of just 260 million yuan. Since the road's completion, the county's GDP has grown at an average annual rate of 13.8 percent, recently crossing the historic 1 billion yuan milestone — a nearly 300 percent total economic expansion.