The sky's the limit

New expressway linking remote, high-altitude regions a challenge to build, but expected to transform local fortunes

In his poem Shu Dao Nan (The Difficulty of Shu Roads), Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet Li Bai writes: "Oh, the road to Shu is as hard as the blue sky to scale!" The Shu Roads got their name from the ancient state of Shu, which once dominated today's Sichuan province, but about which relatively little else is known, due to a lack of documentation.

The builders of the expressway linking Jigzhi county in the Golog Tibetan autonomous prefecture in Qinghai province, to Barkam county, the capital of the Aba Tibetan and Qiang autonomous prefecture in Sichuan province, know how complex it is to build a road in a region with such steep terrain.

Extending for 219 kilometers, the four-lane expressway lies at an altitude above 3,300 meters. This means that the annual average temperature is just 1.4 C, and can drop as low as — 36 C. Since construction began in 2020, this extreme climate has limited work to roughly six months a year, according to the Sichuan Jiuma Expressway Company, which was responsible for the road's construction.