TAMING THE DESERT

Every day, 11 sets of passenger trains and 36 sets of cargo trains run along the Baotou-Lanzhou Railway. Protected by seedlings, grass hedges and trees, carriages tear through the southern edge of the Tengger Desert with ease.

"Before 1949, the desert was only 200 meters from Zhongwei. Experts from the Soviet Union, invited to design the railway, predicted that the railway would be buried by sand in 30 years," said Gao Yonggui, deputy head of Zhongwei Gusha (Dune-Fixing) Forestry Farm.

Sandy weather used to hit Shapotou 300 days out of the year. The year after the railway went into operation, sand buried the rails and suspended operations 11 times, he said.

In 1955, the Chinese Academy of Sciences established its first observation station in Shapotou. The next year, China's first forestry station in the desert was founded in Zhongwei. To address the issues the sand was causing, workers and researchers began relentlessly experimenting with desert control techniques.

Straw structures, which resemble checkerboards, remain the most convenient, environmentally-friendly and cheapest way of stopping sand encroachment. In Zhongwei, farmers make the straw checkerboards almost every day. Women place the straw on top of the sand, and men use a shovel to partially bury it in the sand, creating a checkerboard pattern spaced one meter apart. Each piece of straw is 10 centimeters below ground and 30 centimeters above ground.

Within the checkerboards, the surface of the sand forms a hard crust over time which prevents the sand from moving. Gao said this crust could last for more than 30 years.