Bianba Ciren's company, a joint venture with a hada workshop based in Qionglai city, in neighboring Sichuan Province, involves an initial investment of 1.8 million yuan (225,000 U.S. dollars) and has 30 modern weaving machines.

    His employees are all Tibetan herders except for three experienced workers he recruited from Sichuan to train the novices and maintain the equipment.

    Even today, 80 percent of the hadas on sale in Lhasa are made in Qionglai, a traditional silk production base and major stop-off point on the Cha Ma Road (literally "Tea Horse" Road) linking the arid plains of Tibet with mountain communities of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in southwest China.

    Until highways were built in the 1950s, hadas had to be carried by "coolies" through the mountains to Qionglai, where the tea horse caravan would carry them into Tibet.

    Mei Shuhua, 80, says her late husband used to be a "cooly".

    "Each trek took about a month, and he had to carry at least 100 kg of hadas," she recalls. "He wore straw sandals and his feet were badly hurt when heavy snow covered the mountains."

    Today, Bianba Ciren still buys silk from Sichuan, and also from renowned silk producers in the eastern Jiangsu Province. It takes an average 10 to 12 days to truck the raw materials to Xigaze.

    "The new railway will be a boon. It will cut the transportation time and costs by half," he says.

    The history-making railway, the world's highest, runs 1,956 kilometers from Qinghai's provincial capital Xining to Lhasa in Tibet. It is expected to be extended further to Xigaze sometime before 2010.

    "It'd be great if hadas made by us Tibetans become available in Lhasa," said Tubdain, a 52-year-old photographer in Lhasa.

    Bianba Ciren expects far more than that.

    "With the opening of the new railway, tourists will flock in. They will take Tibetan-made hadas home and present Tibetan culture to their families and friends," he said.

    More than 2.5 million tourists are expected to come to Tibet this year. With trains running direct from Shanghai to Lhasa, tourism is expected to double by 2010 bringing in an annual direct tourism income of 5.8 billion yuan (725 million U.S. dollars), says Xu Hao, deputy director of the Tibet regional tourism department.

    Debate continues over when exactly hadas first appeared in Tibet. Puncog Cering, a Tibetan historian, says hadas existed more than 2,000 years ago, but were made of wool until silk was brought in by Princess Wencheng, the bride of Songzan Gambo, who was then ruler of ancient Tibet, in 641. Enditem