In the summer of 2006, the Chinese government fulfilled a fifty-year plan to build a railway into Tibet. As noted by Abrahm Lustgarten in his book China's Great Train, 'Since Mao Tse Tung first envisioned it, the railway line had grown into an imperative component of China's breakneck economic expansion and one of the first technological maneuvers in strengthening China's grip over Tibet, this remote and often mystical frontier, which promises rich resources and geographic supremacy over South Asia'. The documentary High Train to Tibet examines the impacts of the train on the Tibetan land and the nomadic and semi nomadic communities who inhabit it, from a environmental, social and cultural point of view.