Dhargyal is worried that his ancestral land has been dug up like a minefield, and that his nomadic family is desperately searching for temporary shelter for their yaks and sheep. Living in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile, Dhargyal can neither go back to his remote Tibetan home, nor can he stop worrying.
Like Dhargyal's family, there are hundreds of Tibetan families who have lost their land to the recently opened train track that runs from Golmud in Qinghai to Lhasa. Even while Beijing trumpets the railway – the highest in the world – as an engineering feat and an economic boon in waiting, these families are either yet to be paid for their confiscated land, or are living in temporary shelters awaiting relocation.
The construction of the new train track, which runs between Tibet's extreme northeast and its capital in the central-south, was finished in September last year, almost a year ahead of schedule. The first train pulled into the new station in Lhasa in mid-July. All along the 1140 km track, China Railway's Western Railway administration has acquired huge tracts of land from Tibetan farmers and nomads, cutting through the grasslands the Tibetans call the Jangthang. Because the Tibetan plateau is an active earthquake zone, the tracks could not simply be laid on a narrow stretch of land. Instead, huge mounds of earth with sloping sides needed to be built up in order to support the infrastructure, which meant the requirement of large tracts of land on both sides of the line. All in all, the breadth of land acquired for the line averages 100 metres.
In Yangpachen, around 90 km northwest of Lhasa where Dhargyal's family lives, the engineers made a mistake and had to re-route the railroad, thus abandoning many kilometres of trenches. The farmers complain that since the fragile soil composition has been disturbed the land can no longer be used for farming; the locals do not have the resources to level this costly mistake.