{"id":37421,"date":"2016-11-11T23:05:10","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T20:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mountainguides.pro\/?p=37421"},"modified":"2026-09-10T16:11:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T13:11:21","slug":"mini-city-planned-below-everest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mountainguides.pro\/pt\/2016\/11\/11\/mini-city-planned-below-everest\/","title":{"rendered":"A mini-city to be built below Everest"},"content":{"rendered":"

China has ambitious plans for Everest. The southern side of the mountain, in Nepal, is the better known, but the Tibetan northern side has a rich mountaineering history of its own, and China intends to commercialise it in earnest. The approach may not look quite right for the highest and most forbidding summit in the world, yet in the longer run it may well succeed.<\/p>\n\n

Earlier this year China opened a new tarmac road that climbs fourteen thousand feet up the slope and ends at a sports base with a car park. The plans include an international mountaineering centre with hotels, restaurants, training facilities and search-and-rescue services. A museum is planned as well.<\/p>\n\n

Many serious mountaineers, who prefer the wild and almost untouched landscape of Nepal, take a dim view of comforts like that. China, all the same, expects the changes to bring economic benefit to politically unstable Tibet, to help develop tourism and to popularise winter sports ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics of 2022. It is no accident that China is also building 800 new ski resorts.<\/p>\n\n

Improvements to the infrastructure around Everest will help to achieve those aims, and at the same time make the mountain safer, cleaner and more convenient for a growing flow of visitors.<\/p>\n\n

The project is expected to turn a profit. In 2014 tourism accounted for 8.9% of Nepal’s gross domestic product, thanks in part to the popularity of trekking and mountaineering. The sector as a whole is estimated to be worth 340 million dollars. The Nepalese government takes in more than 3 million dollars a year from Everest climbing permit fees, which run to as much as 11 thousand dollars a head.<\/p>\n\n

Unfortunately, those fees are not always used sensibly, and that opens new possibilities for China. The Nepalese side faces a range of problems: corruption, weak organisation and questions of safety. Climbers, for example, are obliged to pay up to 3000 dollars for the services of \u201cliaison officers\u201d to accompany them, but according to a government investigation most of those officers simply take the money and stay in Kathmandu. The result is a set of chronic problems, among them difficulties for newcomers, too many people on the mountain and a great deal of accumulated rubbish.<\/p>\n\n

The most serious problem is safety. A little above the camp on the Nepalese side lies the Khumbu Icefall, a dangerous glacier that has caused most of the deaths on Everest in recent years, including the deaths of 16 Sherpas in 2014. Crowding and inexperienced climbers only sharpen that threat.<\/p>\n\n

All of this is nudging mountaineers to look at the Tibetan side. The tragedy of 2014, for instance, prompted Adrian Ballinger, founder of Alpine Expeditions, to move his Everest routes from Nepal to Tibet. Ballinger, who has been travelling in Nepal since 1997 and has climbed Everest seven times, says the decision was an easy one. \u201cI noticed the Chinese government’s determination to raise safety standards and improve environmental management on the mountain,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n

Ballinger gave several examples, among them China’s work to fix reliable ropes and ladders along the routes (work done, he notes, \u201cto a very high standard\u201d). In Nepal the same jobs are done by Sherpas and by climbers, and the standard can vary. China is also restricting access for inexperienced climbers, which lowers the risk of dangerous crowding. On top of that, China runs an effective communications system in which competent officials monitor what climbers do and what waste they leave.<\/p>\n\n

The arrival of an alternative route is bad news for Nepal, which is trying to rebuild its tourist industry after the devastating earthquake of 2015. With many cultural sites destroyed, some mountain routes still closed and the political situation unsettled, the near future will not be easy for the country. There is a cultural problem too: China’s development of Everest means that a mountain many in Nepal hold sacred, and which it was long forbidden to climb, may now be under the control of a country with different priorities.<\/p>\n\n

For visitors, all the same, the opening up may prove positive. Rather than leave Everest a wild and untouched zone, as the United States has done with its national parks, China is choosing a European approach to the Himalaya, close to the one used in the Alps. Anyone can now reach the foot of the Matterhorn by train and then climb safely on prepared routes under the eye of rangers. Accessibility takes the place of the natural purity that has been lost.<\/p>\n\n

That approach may turn out to be the right one for high-mountain tourism, and if China sticks to it, the country stands a fair chance of becoming the new gateway to the Himalaya.<\/p>\n\n

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What to look at next<\/h2>\n

See the programme:<\/strong> Climbing Everest<\/a><\/p>\n