(2) Keith Bradsher, 铁轨上的丝绸之路. 纽约时报中文网, Oct 21, 2013
http://cn.nytimes.com/business/20131021/c21silkroad/
, which is translated from
Keith Bradsher, Hauling New Treasure On the Silk Road; With freight trains as their caravans, manufacturers are reviving an ancient way to ship efficiently from China. New York Times, July 21, 2013 (in the Sunday Business section).
Quote:
“Initially an experiment run in summer months, HP is now dispatching trains on the nearly 7,000-mile route at least once a week, and up to three times a week when demand warrants. HP plans to ship by rail throughout the coming winter, having taken elaborate measures to protect the cargo from temperatures that can drop to 40 degrees below zero.
Though the route still accounts for just a small fraction of manufacturers’ overall shipments from China to Europe, other companies are starting to follow HP’s example. Chinese authorities announced on Wednesday the first of six long freight trains this year from Zhengzhou, a manufacturing center in central China, to Hamburg, Germany, following much the same route across western China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland as the HP trains.
Silk Road “began around 120 BC, when Xi’an in west-central China — best known for its terra cotta warriors — was China’s capital. * * * But as maritime navigation expanded in the 1300s and 1400s, and as China’s political center shifted east to Beijing, China’s economic activity also moved toward the coast.
“Trucking goods from inland factories to the ports of Shenzhen or Shanghai on the coast and then sending the goods by ship around India and through the Suez Canal takes five weeks. The Silk Road train cuts the shipping time from western China to retail distribution centers in western Europe to three weeks. The sea route is still about 25 percent cheaper than sending goods by train, but the cost of the added time by sea is considerable. By switching from ocean freight to rail freight, ‘the inventory costs and lead times will see a lot of improvement,’ said Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek, the world’s third-largest player in the global market for tablet computers, after Apple and Samsung.”
“HP took the first steps to move production west from Shanghai four years ago. Now its contractors employ 80,000 workers in Chongqing, making 20 million laptops and 15 million printers a year. Foxconn, the big Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturer, has twice as many workers in nearby Chengdu, mainly making Apple iPads, and has been shifting production there from Shenzhen.
“But persistently high oil prices made the cost of airfreight daunting — as much as seven times the cost of rail freight. H.P. was also concerned about the carbon emissions involved in airfreight, which are 30 times those of the rail or sea routes.
At the China-Kazakhstan border, HP “containers to stay locked and uninspected at border crossings along the route, although the containers are X-rayed for contraband. * * *An overhead crane and two cranes that looked like cottages on wheels lifted the H.P. containers off the Chinese train, and loaded them onto flat cars with wider wheel gauges in the rail yard in [the town of] Dostyk on the Kazakh side of the border. Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus, all traversed on the trip, have wide rails inherited from the Soviet rail system. China and Europe have narrower rails, so cargo transfers take several hours. * * * When the train reached the Belarus-Poland border, the containers had to be moved again to flat cars with a narrower wheel gauge.
“The locomotive was built at a new factory in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, by a Russian-Kazakh joint venture that licensed the design from General Electric. The locomotive’s body, generator, radiator and wheels are made in Kazakhstan, but G.E. exports the diesel engine from Erie, Pa — although GE and the joint venture are making plans to start building a diesel engine factory in Astana as well next year.
“China to Holland, in 21 Days Ask ocean shipping executives about the possible challenge from the new Central Asian rail route and they say that it will not take away enough business to affect their bottom lines.
Note:
(a) Press release: HP to Strengthen Presence in China with New PC Manufacturing Plant; Pioneering move in West China to accelerate economic development. HP, Oct 9, 2008.
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/081009a.html
(b) lead time (n; First Known Use 1944):
“the time between the beginning of a process or project and the appearance of its results”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lead%20time
(c) So Asus is the third largest tablet producer of the world!
(d) “The train was punctual in reaching the Dzungarian Gate, a low, wide valley through the snow-capped mountain ranges that separates China and Kazakhstan.”
Dzungarian Gate 阿拉山口
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungarian_Gate
Quote:
“The Dzungarian Gate is a straight valley which penetrates the Dzungarian Alatau mountain range 阿拉套山 along the border between Kazakhstan and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It currently serves as a railway corridor between China and the west
“Dzungaria is named after a Mongolian kingdom which existed in Central Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It derived its name from the Dzungars 准噶尔, who were so called because they formed the left wing (züün, left; gar, hand) of the Mongolian army, the self-named Oirats. It was raised to its greatest prominence by Kaldan (also known as Galdan Boshigtu Khan) in the latter half of the 17th century, who made repeated incursions on the territory of the Kazakh state, but was completely destroyed by the Qing government [Kangxi Emperor specifically] in about 1757–1759.
(e) View the map in
track gauge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge
(f) “Herders on horseback, wearing pointy woolen knit caps, tended flocks of sheep, cattle and horses.”
(i) Michael Fergus and Janar Jandosova (eds), Kazakhstan; Coming of age. London: Stacey International, 2003 at page 216
http://books.google.com/books?id ... trimmed&f=false
("The headwear of Kazakh men was a sharply pointed hat, trimmed with fox-fur, sable or mink. In summer these were replaced by tall caps of thin felt")
Above the sentence was a red hat with elaborate decoration. That is it.
(ii) Opublikowano, Kazakhstan's Traditional Clothes. July 31, 2012
traditionalclothingoftheworld.blogspot.com/2012/07/kazakhstans-traditional-clothes.html
(Two men in different photos wore these hats, in photos 1 and 3)
(g) “Mr Kulyenov [train driver] marveled at how quickly freight trains headed in the opposite direction moved onto sidings to make way for his high-priority shipment. ‘This is the first time I’ve driven the HP train,’ said Mr Kulyenov, who has been a train driver for eight years, ‘and the first time I’ve seen so much respect on the track.’”
siding
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/siding
(h)
(i) “Dawns and sunsets played on the horizon in nearly hourlong shows of pink, mauve and purple. Kazakhstan looks a bit like North Dakota; both grow a lot of wheat. But Kazakhstan is slightly larger than the United States east of the Mississippi River, with fewer people than Florida.
mauve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauve
(mauve is French form of Malva "mallow" [Malva is the genus name, from Latin malva, from Greek--all meaning the “mallow” flower (mallow is the present-day English spelling, compared with Old English "malwe"])
population:
Kazakhstan 16 million (2009 census)
Florida 18.8 million (2010 census)
(ii) The HP “train [from Chongqing] reached Duisburg, Germany, on July 3, or 19 days after the containers left Chongqing. Trucks then took the containers overnight to their final destination, HP’s European distribution center, in Oostrum, the Netherlands.”
City of Duisburg is located “at the confluence of the Rhine and Ruhr” Rivers. Wiki
Oostrum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oostrum
(a small village of 200)
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发表于 10-24-2013 15:34:33
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