Ultimately, it will extend all the way to Singapore, via Malaysia. Other branches of the network will reach into Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Computer generated images showing the proposed Kunming, China, to Bangkok, Thailand, high speed train as it traverses sparsely populated and desperately poor Laos Photo: ANDREW CHANT FOR THE TELEGRAPH

China's 120mph railway arriving in Laos

China's mammoth engineering project to construct a railway from southwest China’s Yunnan Province all the way to Singapore is set to transform rural Laos

The Telegraph (UK) | 14 Jan. 2014

Like most of his 6.5 million fellow countrymen Galong Vue has never seen or set foot on a train. 

But the 53-year-old farmer knows all about the high-speed railway from China that will run through his village in northwest Laos. 

“We first heard the rumour that the railway would come through here in 2010,” he says “Then the Chinese came to survey the land last year. They told me the railway will happen for sure and that a train station will be built here.” 

^{Galong Vue (ANDREW CHANT FOR THE TELEGRAPH)}

Sometime this year, Mr Vue’s village of Naseam Kham will be gone, replaced by a state-of-the-art railway station capable of accommodating trains that cruise at 120mph. Judging by a Chinese promotional video seen by The Telegraph, the station will dwarf every building in the nearby town of Oudomxai that it will serve.

Beijing has long dreamed of a high-speed railway connecting it to southeast Asia, enabling Chinese goods to move south in greater quantities, while the natural resources of its neighbours travel north to China. 

Now, the line is set to become a reality, one that will draw the region even closer in to China’s economic embrace. 

^{A computer-generated image of the train emerging from the forest}

Last year, the secretive leaders of Laos, a one-party communist state run by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, met with China’s premier Li Keqiang. They described the project as a “priority” and called for the formal agreement to build the railway to be “signed soon”. 

Starting from Kunming in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, the railway will travel south through neighbouring Laos and then into Thailand. 

Ultimately, it will extend all the way to Singapore, via Malaysia. Other branches of the network will reach into Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. 

Constructing it will be a mammoth engineering task. It will require 154 bridges and 76 tunnels, as well as 31 train stations, just to get the line the 260 miles from Boten on the Laos-China border to Laos’ capital Vientiane. An estimated 20,000 Chinese workers will be needed to build it, with the completion date set for 2019. 

Land-locked Laos will be transformed by the railway. A largely agricultural nation where the average annual income is a mere £720 and many people, like Mr Vue, live without running water or electricity, Laos lacks both industry and infrastructure. 

Currently, the country boasts just two miles of functioning railway track. 

Operated by Thailand, it runs across the Thai-Laos frontier close to Vientiane. Few Lao people have ever travelled along it. 

Laos, though, does have minerals such as potash and resources like rubber that China craves. 

With China already the second-largest investor in Laos, after Vietnam, many locals fear the railway is further evidence of how their country is set to become an economic vassal of Beijing.
^{Two Chinese entrepreneurs survey the land near Luang Namtha in northern Laos. They told their local Laotian guides that they were planning to build a hotel in the area once construction of the controversial high speed train line is started (ANDREW CHANT FOR THE TELEGRAPH)}

“Of course Lao people are worried about the impact of the railway and the number of Chinese coming here, but the reality is that we can’t stop the Chinese. They are everywhere already and there are so many of them. If they want to come to Laos, they will,” said a teacher in Oudomxai who asked to be known by the pseudonym Tou Vang. 

Chinese residents now make up around 15% of Oudomxai’s population of 30,000. Chinese-owned hotels, shops and restaurants line the roads and the street signs are in both Lao and Mandarin. 

“You won’t find a single Chinese person in Oudomxai who doesn’t want the railway to happen. It will bring more Chinese people and more business for us,” said Ah Hai, a 27-year-old from Guangzhou in southern China, who moved to Oudomxai two months ago to run a shop front gambling operation catering to Chinese punters. 

Yet despite the vast economic disparity between Laos and its giant neighbour, it is Vientiane which will foot the bill for the rail link. 

Using untapped minerals as collateral, Laos plans to borrow £4.5 billion from Beijing to pay for its section of the railway. Equivalent to almost 90 per cent of Laos’s annual GDP of £5.2 billion, the loan will instantly make Laos the world’s fourth most-indebted nation after Japan, Zimbabwe and Greece. 

Many international financial bodies regard the loan as a disaster waiting to happen. The Asian Development Bank has described it simply as “unaffordable”. 

^{The flat rice fields of Nasaemkham village on the outskirts of Oudomxai in northern Laos (ANDREW CHANT FOR THE TELEGRAPH)}

Just servicing the yearly interest on the loan will amount to almost 20% of Laos’s annual government spending, according to Tristan Knowles, a director of Economists at Large, a Melbourne-based think tank, who has made a study of the financial implications of the railway. 

“Where are they going to find that money? I imagine they will have to prune every part of the government budget,” said Mr Knowles. 

All that is holding up the railway is Thailand. Beijing is believed to be waiting for the Thai parliament to approve a planned £41 billion infrastructure upgrade, which will include a high-speed rail line from the Laos border to Bangkok, before signing off on the loan. 

That bill is expected to pass within a couple of months and will guarantee that the railway reaches the increasingly lucrative Thai market. 

Mr Vue and his fellow villagers, though, appear to be on the fast track to nowhere. “The government hasn’t spoken to us about compensation,” he said. 

“It’s one thing to improve the country but we need something too. All we have is our land. If we lose it, we won’t be able to do anything.”