There Are People Beyond the Tianshan Mountains

In 2020, twenty-two-year-old Li Gawa, from the mountainous Dingxi region of Gansu, heads to Xinjiang with fellow villagers to work on the Tianshan Shengli Tunnel, carrying a simple dream: earn enough money to marry. The world's longest expressway tunnel, stretching 22.13 kilometers, must cut through multiple geological fault zones and bore through the natural barrier that separates southern and northern Xinjiang, deep in the frigid, oxygen-starved Tianshan Mountains. When Li Gawa first arrives in the snowy mountains, he's still a brash, impulsive young man. The high-altitude cold, magma, and surging groundwater deep inside the tunnel constantly test his courage and patience. But the plateau brings more than life-and-death trials: it also has its fair share of romance. At a herders' settlement near the construction site, Li Gawa meets Guli, a Uyghur woman who works at the local clinic. Familiar with the land, she tells him about the hardships herders have faced for generations because the Tianshan Mountains cut them off, as well as the Torghut people's heroic return east. Over the long years of construction, the two gradually come to understand and love each other. Sunset on the grasslands, milk tea in yurts, and the Naadam Festival: a romance infused with the spirit of the northwest quietly blossoms at the foot of the snow-capped mountains. Meanwhile, the excavation runs into a deadly obstacle. A tunnel-boring machine strays into a hidden zone of altered, liquefied mudstone, and the 2,800-ton machine is buried in slurry, triggering a grueling fourteen-month struggle. Cave-ins loom at every turn. The entire crew grits its teeth, reinforcing the ground with grout again and again and digging a bypass tunnel as they face off against the treacherous mountain. In the dark depths of the tunnel, Li Gawa sheds his immaturity and impatience, growing from a reckless apprentice into a steady, dependable road builder. His understanding of what building a road means, and his feelings for this land, quietly begin to change.