BISHKEK (TCA) — A container train linking China and Iran departed from Yiwu City in east China’s Zhejiang Province loaded with Chinese small commodities on January 28, Xinhua reported.
According to the train’s operator, Yiwu Tianmeng industry investment company, it is the first regular container train linking China to the Middle East.
The train will exit China through Alataw Pass in Xinjiang, the westernmost Chinese region, and pass through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan before reaching its destination Tehran.
Company president Feng Xubin said it will take the train 14 days to complete the 10,399 kilometers journey.
Catering to the Belt and Road Initiative, the train is expected to further promote China’s cooperation with Middle Eastern countries.
Yiwu is a famous production base for small commodities and it has been keeping close foreign trade ties with countries in the Middle East.
There are currently about 4,000 Middle East businessmen living in Yiwu and more than 180 companies set up by Middle East investors. The city witnessed 58.3 billion yuan ($8.8 billion) of exports to the Middle East in 2015.
China Daily reported last November that China’s railway authority had proposed building a Silk Road high-speed railway connecting the country’s northwestern Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region to West Asia via Central Asia.
The proposed route is from China’s Urumqi and Yining to Almaty in Kazakhstan, then to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, Tashkent and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, and finally linking to West Asia’s rail network through Tehran, Iran.
The new line would be complementary to the existing railway network in Central Asia. It would also resolve the problem of the incompatibility between Central Asia’s wide-gauge track system and China’s standard-gauge system.
