Zang Shoujie (center front) at the construction site.	Xie Fangliang (center) at the construction site.	Workers on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway built more than just an engineering wonder - they also created a wonder of life.

Considering its average altitude of 4,500 meters above sea level, its thin oxygen levels and a lowest temperature of around 40.8 degrees Celsius, the recently completed Golmud-Lhasa section of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway is a new wonder of the world. Running as it does through constant snow and sandstorms, the 1,142-kilometer-long section was laid in “life's forbidden zone,” one cannot help but wonder how the railway workers managed this extremely arduous feat under the world's harshest natural conditions.

Recently we visited Peng Jianghong, deputy chief executive of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Construction Headquarters. Peng has worked on the railway for more than 10 years. His colleagues gave him the nickname of “Great General Peng,” as he shares the same surname as the famous PLA general Peng Dehuai. And like the original Great General Peng, he can maneuver his men around different construction sites with confidence and competence. Yet Peng exhibits an air of humbleness. He says, “I'm just an ordinary worker among thousands of railway builders.” Instead of talking about himself, Peng Jianghong took us to meet some of his colleagues.

Zang Shoujie: “Not One Less”

The 46-year-old Zang Shoujie is chief of the distinguished Qinghai-Tibet Railway Construction Team of the China Railway 13 th Bureau Group. Peng evaluated him as a conscientious and perfectionist worker, a man of great charisma, and a diehard on the “Celestial Road” who had neglected all the chances and temptations that came his way for personal advancement. His mission was his only concern in the world.

We met Zang Shoujie at his office. Zang displayed such a polite and scholarly manner that one might be forgiven for assuming he was an executive in a luxurious boardroom rather than a helmet-headed foreman on a construction site. “The achievements of the 13 th Bureau belong to the team,” said Zang, beaming with pride. “I can feel in every one of them the spirit of the railway worker: Challenge all extremities to do a first-class job.”

The 13th Bureau worked on a 58.65-kilometer section of the Golmud-Lhasa railway. To assess and plan for the harsh living and working conditions that his team would inevitably face, Zang Shoujie often hiked eight kilometers from his office to the construction site and spent the day there before returning to his office to handle his daily executive tasks at night. He suffered badly from altitude sickness, and often had to be hooked up to a drip and an oxygen cylinder while he worked. During his years on the plateau, Zang had two car accidents, but they did nothing to dampen his spirit or his energy for the job. After the accidents, his wife Zhang Xiuzhen did not try to keep him at home. She says, “For him, being back with his workers was the perfect medicine.”

Zang Shoujie was a role model for his workers. Under his leadership, all of the projects undertaken by the 13 th Bureau passed their various tests first time around, and more than 40 of those projects were evaluated as high-quality model projects. In 2004, Zang Shuojie and his workers restored an 80,000-square-meter patch of wetland, a feat lauded as an environmental protection miracle on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. The following year, the 13 th Bureau came first in a comprehensive evaluation as part of a railway labor contest. Zang himself received several personal accolades, including the Railway Locomotive Medal, Model Worker of Tibet Autonomous Region, and the prestigious title of Excellent Project Manager of 2005 in National Engineering Construction, awarded by the Ministry of Construction.

Workers' health and safety was one of the three major concerns in building the railway on the plateau. “Like the substitute teacher in Zhang Yimou's film Not One Less , I was determined to make sure all those I took to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau returned safely,” says Zang. The 13 th Bureau spent some RMB 4.2 million on setting up a field hospital on its construction site. Workers were given regular physical examinations, and medics were on hand 24 hours to handle any emergencies. When the Sixth International Plateau Medical Conference was held in 2004, the 13 th Bureau's field hospital was made the showcase hospital for the Golmud-Lhasa section. Some 230 medical professionals from both home and abroad visited the hospital, and were amazed by what they saw.

Xie Fangliang: An Iron Man with Soft Tears

Xie Fangliang headed up the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Construction Team of the China Railway 19 th Bureau Group. He was honored as a model worker of Tibet Autonomous Region in the year 2004 and won the National May Day Labor Medal in 2006. Peng Jianghong acknowledged him as “highly dedicated, tough and unbreakable,” and more importantly, as a “man of vast knowledge and expertise.”

Xie is a railway-engineering specialist. He took with him to the plateau more than 10 years of experience in project management. Xie is a frank man who has no time for any words of superficiality. He practically lived on the railway from his first investigative trip in March 2002 until the inauguration of the railway in July 2006. The only time he spent away was a few days with his family during each Spring Festival. He reads extensively in both Chinese and English - in fact reading consumes almost all of his spare time.

It is said that altitude sickness “afflicts men more than women, and the strong rather than the weak.” Xie's 183-cm frame therefore made him vulnerable to the condition, which was exacerbated by his heavy workload. His weight dropped dramatically, while the strong plateau sun left his exposed skin raw and brown. It also affected his eyesight to the extent that Xie wore dark glasses even when indoors.

But, as another perfectionist, Xie says, “It was a rare honor to work on the world's highest railway. I allowed no defect on the job.” His construction team camped in Amdo and Nagqu counties, where the altitude ranges between 4,600 and 5,000 meters above sea level, the annual mean temperature is 2.9 degrees Celsius below zero and some very strong winds blow. It was under such extreme conditions that the team undertook both the railway and utility construction for the southern Tanggula Mountain section at an altitude of 5,072 meters. This involved a massive amount of work. The utility and infrastructure projects alone extended for some 400 kilometers, and Xie had to scatter his men along the entire line.

As the construction work was rolling along in the spring of 2004, the weather unexpectedly intervened. The rainy season visited the plateau ahead of schedule, turning the construction site into a swamp. More than 200 heavily loaded trucks drove up to the site, but one of them got stuck in a ditch. More than 100 workers braved the driving rain and used steel cables to drag the bogged truck out of the way. Xie Fangliang confesses that his eyes became wet when he witnessed such a moving sight. Worried about the progress of the project during the rainy season, Xie visited the construction site three times a day, despite the bad weather and a 60-kilometer trip each time. The last trip often saw him return to his office in small hours of the night.

Health and safety was also a paramount concern for the 19 th Bureau. It built a three-level medical services system at a cost of RMB 7 million. The 19 th Bureau thus managed to keep the prevalence of severe cases of plateau disease down to 0.36 percent, much lower than the target of 2 percent set by the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Construction Headquarters. All of those that had taken ill recovered.

The Co Nag Lake is a main habitat of the black-necked crane, the brown-headed gull and the bar-headed goose, all of which are under state-level protection. It is also the source of the Nujiang River. Xie Fangliang and his workers built a 40-km-long protective wall using more than 200,000 sandbags to prevent garbage and wastewater from escaping into the lake. Large steel rubbish bins were set up at two-km intervals along the construction line, and work was strictly confined within its border. These protective measures were later promoted along the entire Qinghai-Tibet construction line, and the railway headquarters and Tibet Autonomous Region honored the 19 th Bureau as an “Environmental Protection Model Group in the Construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway.”

Under Xie Fangliang's leadership, the 19 th Bureau received a wealth of other honors, including the Railway Ministry's “Locomotive Cup,” three successive years as the “Model Group in the Labor Contest of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Construction,” and the Labor Contest's Railway Series.

But all the pride stirred up by those awards paled in comparison to Xie's emotions one day last July. “The greatest day of my life was the day I saw the train rolling through the 19 th Bureau section of the railway,” says Xie. And at that moment, this man of iron melted into a puddle of soft tears.