Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

His family and friends told him not to go. The roads were terrible. The people were even worse: rude, duplicitous, reeking of mutton. And there was nothing to trade, anyway, in that forlorn and forgotten stretch of land, where camel-humped mountains met endless sand dunes. Wasn't Xinjiang, in western China, merely the remote testing ground for the nation's nuclear weapons? But Huang Yinrong was determined. He hailed from eastern Zhejiang province, where Marco Polo had once marveled at the overflowing markets. Commerce was in Huang's blood. So in 1996 he boarded a rusting plane for Xinjiang's capital, UrŸmqi. A friend had told him that foreign steel was selling for cheap, and given that Xinjiang happened to border eight countries—Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India—Huang thought the place had potential for an import-export business. "At the time, everyone was reinventing themselves in China," recalls Huang. "I figured I had an advantage because I was going to find a new career in a place others didn't go."

A millennium ago, it would have been unimaginable for an ambitious merchant not to be drawn to Xinjiang. The territory was, after all, the nexus of the ancient Silk Road, where the bazaars thronged with Nestorians, Sogdians, Arabs, Manicheans, Levantines, Koreans, Malays, even the odd Venetian. But when feuding tribes made overland travel perilous, and sea lanes to Cathay evolved into a safe alternative, the sturdy filaments of the Silk Road frayed. By the 13th century, Venice's wandering son was among the last waves of travelers on the venerable trade route.

In the 700 years since, empires—Mongol, Manchu, Soviet—have come and gone, and capitalism for a time even succumbed to the torpor of communism. But now a new caravan class is again navigating the Silk Road, and Huang Yinrong is among its vanguard. The year after he landed in UrŸmqi, he journeyed across the mountain pass to neighboring Kazakhstan, where a steel factory lay in the country's high steppes. For most of the train trip, he sat nervously hugging a briefcase filled with cash, as drunk Russians caroused around him. The only Russian he could remember from school—back when the language was still taught in a China yoked by ideology to the Soviet Union—was do svidaniya (goodbye); Huang prayed he wouldn't have to say do svidaniya to his money. At his destination, a snowstorm was raging. Huang had no hat, and his hair froze. But the bosses at the Kazakh plant, which is now owned by Mittal Steel, were impressed by this intrepid visitor clad only in a thin leather jacket. Though barely any trade trickled through the two nations because of lingering tensions from the Sino-Soviet split years before, they agreed to Huang's unorthodox plan to export steel to China. Today, most of Kazakhstan's processed iron ore is sent directly to its eastern neighbor. Huang had helped inaugurate a key spoke of the new Silk Road—and this time it was reinforced by steel.

China's global emergence ranks as the greatest renaissance of our times. But, too often, we tell this redemptive tale only from its eastern fringes, ignoring the vast expanse of western China that laps up against Central and South Asia, and beckons toward the Middle East and Europe. Our language of commerce is English, and our attention rests on the "Made in China" containers shipped with mounting urgency from the country's coast. Yet it is in China's backyard, that immense Eurasian landmass, that a 21st century version of the Great Game is being played out. Unlike the last round, when a weakened Middle Kingdom could only watch as Russia and Britain battled for geopolitical dominance, this time China is leading the charge. "All these new paths lead to Xinjiang," says Jumagul Ashake, an ethnic Kyrgyz Chinese who, though the granddaughter of shepherds, works for a trading firm in the province's historic second city, Kashgar. "The new Silk Road is open for business," says the 24-year-old, cell phone and gold-rimmed sunglasses in hand. "And I want to be a part of it."

Beijing is using the reborn Silk Road to trade, to satisfy its seemingly unquenchable appetite for natural resources, and to forge alliances with its western neighbors. Already, China has joined with Russia, India, Iran, Pakistan, Mongolia and most of the former Soviet Central Asian republics in a regional alliance of member states and observer nations called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). While hardly as prominent as the European Union, the SCO far outstrips the E.U. in terms of population and wealth of natural resources. In July, Asia's two giants, China and India, formally opened their border after more than 40 years of barbed-wire animosity. And in Pakistan, energy-starved China has helped finance the construction of the Gwadar deep-sea port on the Arabian Sea. Not only will Gwadar facilitate faster passage of Chinese goods to Europe, but the port will also bring Persian Gulf oil to China more quickly through Xinjiang. The roads and railways that will connect Gwadar to Kashgar are also being underwritten by the Chinese. So was the $700 million oil pipeline from Kazakhstan to Xinjiang, which started commercial operations last month and marks the first time foreign oil has flowed directly into China.

Given China's enormous need for energy, Huang Yinrong has diversified his Silk Road business to include black gold as well as steel. The 55-year-old entrepreneur's various foreign ventures have made him a billionaire. Xinjiang has gotten richer too. When Huang arrived a decade ago, the territory was a backwater. Today, the capital, UrŸmqi, bristles with a pincushion of new high-rises and construction sites. Dusty streets where donkeys once roamed are now lined with BMW showrooms and strobe-lit nightclubs filled with Russian-speaking bar girls. Around town, billboards in Cyrillic and Arabic, the region's lingua francas of commerce, offer traders from Central Asia and beyond the best deals in long-distance trucks and air-freight shipping. Trade volume in this far-west boomtown jumped six times between 2002 and 2005. In Xinjiang as a whole, foreign trade in January-April 2006 increased 42% year-on-year, to $2.65 billion, the fastest growth rate among all of China's provinces.

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