In the summer of 2006, the Chinese government completed a project that had been planned for fifty years. Since Mao envisioned it, the railway line had taken on national significance: an integral part of a frenzied economic development and a definitive solution to the issue of controlling Tibet, a remote and often mysterious region that promised abundant resources and geopolitical dominance in South Asia. With 100,000 workers and $4.3 billion, the project was completed ahead of schedule. In 2007, four million tourists (95% of them Chinese) flooded the once forbidden city in an ironic twist of history: the Tibet they wanted to visit no longer existed, and in just a few years, its population had doubled.

Through the lives of the Chinese and Tibetans caught up in the whirlwind of this project, "Fortune" magazine writer and author Abrahm Lustgarten explores the Wild West atmosphere of the Chinese economy today. We follow Chinese engineer Zhang Luzin as he carves out and constructs the line over treacherous mountains and perpetually frozen (for now) terrain, the permafrost. We meet the resilient Tibetan shopkeeper Renzin, struggling to survive in a rapidly developing city that favors the Han Chinese. As the train - reaching the highest point any train has ever reached and with the steepest inclines - traverses China and arrives in Lhasa, it carries not only the Chinese "Go West" campaign but also the waves of impoverished rural population thirsting for a different, urban life and ready to supply cheap labor to the Chinese economic miracle. The lives of Zhang and Renzin are irreversibly changed, and along with them, their societies, sometimes for the better and sometimes not.

"The Great Train" is a timely and provocative book, a captivating firsthand account of the Chinese economic phenomenon, the challenges, and the consequences of development in the world's most populous country.