Sun Jiding will never forget the first time he traveled from Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, to Urumqi, capital of the neighboring Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, in 1983.

He was trapped in the train for 54 hours during the journey that covered nearly 2,000 km. "I looked out at the seemingly endless Gobi Desert and said to myself 'Xinjiang is just too far away'.

"But Xinjiang finally has a high-speed railway, which has brought us closer to the rest of the country and, most important, to Beijing."