HEART OF ASIA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 141, 17 June 1930, Page 6

HEART OF ASIA.

A thousand years or so ago the Emperors of China, wise men with due appreciation of the good things,of life, would eat no melons but the melons of Kashgar. And though Kashgar was a few thousand miles away, their punctilious subjects kept the roads in repair and the post-horses it, and the fleet steeds carried the best melons of Kashgar, carefully wrapped to avoid bruises, two thousand miles to the Emperor's table. They were worth it; but long ago the roads fell into disrepair, bandits preyed upon the trade routes, and the post became a mere memory. So did the melons,-except in Kashgar. In Kashgar the melons still wax luscious, but to taste them you must go to Kashgar. And the trip to , Kashgar from aitywhere else in the world requires months, and perhaps may not be made at all. The distinction between bandits and officials in the heart of Asia has been thin for centuries, and few travellers risk the confusion.

Alma Ata was almost as remote as Kashgar, and far less entrancing, until one sunny day in last July, when the first freight train stumbled into Alma Ata over the new-laid rails, and 40,000 people, some on pony-back, some camel-back and some afoot, gathered to see the strange monster. And shortly the first through train will run over the Turkestan-Siberia route, from Lugovaia, beyond Tashkend, through Alma Ata to Semipalatinsk, in Siberia. It will open a mighty territory to civilisation. Steel rails in the heart of Asia to-day are making history almost as dramatically and significantly as the steel rails that linked the two American oceans made history a little more than half a.century ago.

The rails have long run through Merv and Bokhara, Samarkand, Andijan and Kokand— storied cities all, famous since the days of the great Mongol Emperors and before. Merv is now the centre of the Turkestan brewing industry, Bokhara is a mere shadow of its former self, and from (Samarkand electric power lines radiate through the heart of a great cotton-growing region. These cities, once so utterly remote, already so busy, will soon be further transformed by the new steel link with Siberia; for when Soviet Russia opens this "Turk-Sib" railway Samarkand will get wheat direct from Siberia, cutting three of the four thousand miles off the old route, and Samarkand's cotton will have ready access to world markets.

Alma Ata, cliosen for Trotsky's place of exile three short years ago, precisely because it was so removed from all connection with the outside world, is already a centre of railroad repair shops. It looks forward to a boom-town future. "All along this central Asiatic route are rich oasis regions, fertile territories, which have declined simply because the caravan routes were too slow to carry their products out to a steel-rail civilisation. And all along the new route are stations on the great caravan routes which cross the mountains into Chinese Turkestan. Kashgar will never again be quite so remote; its melons may soon be eaten in Paris. Urumchi, too, will look westward for trade rather than eastward along the Ion"-, slow route into China. Politically as well as economically, the thousand-mile railroad, the longest line built anywhere in the .world since Austria's ultimatum to Serbia, will be revolutionary. Central Asia, once the centre of tremendous empires, the treasurehouse of the world for centuries, is coming into its own again. KT.