Red route: following the new 1833km gas pipeline from China to Turkmenistan

After waiting anxiously in line, the gates to Kazakhstan opened. Crossing the border, we trailed behind families as they dragged rollaways and carried cardboard boxes of fruit and electronics. Having found a driver who was willing to give us a ride for a reasonable fare, we hopped into a tattered, dusty sedan and headed for Almaty. The Kazakh pop music booming from the car stereo felt ecstatic. The driver was in his 40s, lived in the border town and made trips to and from Almaty each day. The intense heat and the barren landscape conjured the American southwest. It was a vast desert, with craters and canyons that seemed infinite. We felt overwhelmingly dehydrated, baking in the bouncing car with the windows down. It was hallucinatory, like a mirage scene from Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana.

We saw signs for cattle crossing, sheep crossing, and people crossing distributed along the A2. We saw above-ground bridges and all sorts of infrastructure recently completed and in-progress across the A2. The historic Silk Road was never a single route, but a larger network of various itineraries that crossed much of Eurasia. The A2, by contrast, is a fixed line. The traffic jam caused by these 200 sheep lasted for about five minutes. Just as we were about to leave the scene, the traffic returned to its usual flow, and the sheep that had just moved to the other side of the A2 turned their heads back to us and started to cross the road again in the opposite direction. Once again, the sheep bleated and the cars honked, like a symphony celebrating the encounter of slow and fast, old and new, flexibility and rigidity.

Whereas the majority of the containers sat idle along the roadside, others had been re-appropriated by locals to serve different functions. In the town of Shu, a bright blue-coloured container had been retrofitted into a small shop selling auto supplies with a sign for Valvoline, an American supplier of motor oil, prominently displayed on the container’s roof. On the road leading to Shymkent, while stopping for gas, we came across a small family that had fused three rectangular containers together to form a house flanked by what amounted to a small “backyard” littered with children’s toys. And in Merki, a town of 35,000 located midway between Almaty and Shymkent, a container served as a small stage, placed prominently outside the entrance to the city park and abutted by a small canopy.

The A2 sector between Korday and Merki runs almost entirely parallel to the Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan border. The difference between the landscapes on either side of the border is very subtle. Nevertheless, the seemingly endless razor-edged fence and the countless watchtowers, painted in camouflage, were still strong indicators of two distinct territories, shaped and protected by the national border.

While the Turkmenistan–China gas pipeline has been rendered in news items and policy documents as a sign of an emerging borderless world, our hours of waiting to cross the Kazakhstan-China overland border in Khorgos, and our days of waiting for proper departure documents in Almaty, actually revealed the rigidity of political borders on the human scale. People and goods were two inseparable components of the historic Silk Road that covered a large territory lacking clearly demarcated borders on the ground. Caravans stopped at fortresses and oases along the way, passing their loads from trader to trader. In an era where each nation-state is a “bordered power-container,” in Anthony Giddens’ words, the pipelines have replaced humans and camels to form a highly efficient yet homogeneous trading route that overcomes political borders.