David Eimer, 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. Daily Telegraph, Jan 15, 2014. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... riving-in-Laos.html
Quote:
(a) "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.
(b) "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.
(c) "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. * * * 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
Note:
(a) Oudomxai Province
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudomxai_Province
(b) Vientiane
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vientiane
(ssection 1 Origin of the name: "The name of the city is derived from Pali [a dead language], the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism. Although the original meaning of the name of the city is 'city of sandalwood,' as shown by ancient Lao inscription which wrote according to etymology[--]unlike modern Lao which is written phonetically[--]in modern Lao the meaning of the name Vientiane is ambiguous")