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The town of Sost is a gateway to millions in Customs duties, with its rickety stalls of corrugated iron engraved in Mandarin and Urdu, its cross-border secret agents and its dusty petrol station’s abrupt service.It is the first stop along a new $46 billion “economic corridor” designed by China in Pakistan.Drivers from China arrive through the Khunjerab Pass, the world’s highest paved border crossing at 4,600 meters above sea level, and unload their goods encircled by the magnificent Karakoram mountains, swirled with snow.
From there, Pakistani colleagues pick up the goods and transport them the length of the country – currently to Karachi, some 2,000 kilometers away on the Arabian Sea, but in the future to Gwadar, where Beijing has been given management of the port in a grand project allowing China greater access to the Middle East, Africa and Europe.But, until recently, the highway was cut off just south of Sost, blocked for five years by a landslide that dammed the Hunza river and birthed the 10 kilometer long lake of Attabad, with its blue glacier water
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