Plan for modern Silk Road endorsed

SHANGHAI, China — Forty-five years after it was proposed, a modern version of the ancient Silk Road that once linked Asia with Europe is closer to becoming fact.

Twenty-three Asian nations yesterday signed a treaty on the road system, envisioned as an 87,500-mile web of highways and ferry routes that would connect 32 Asian countries. The nine others, who have endorsed the project, are expected to commit soon.

The Asian Highway Agreement is intended to ensure construction of a road system, modeled on the route traders once traveled by camel train, to provide access for many landlocked Asian nations.

The system was first proposed in 1959 but was delayed by decades of Cold War distrust.

The Asian Highway would be not one road but an entire system of routes that, by land and by sea, would link Tokyo to Turkey, Bhutan to Bulgaria.

A map of the planned highways resembles a spider web strung from Finland and St. Petersburg to Khabarovsk and Tokyo. Spurs extend through Turkey as it meshes across Central Asia, crosses India and loops through Southeast Asia down to the Indonesian island of Bali.

Though China is a key proponent of the plan, so far the potential Asian Highway routes through China total only about 8,500 miles. One would link Shanghai with the border crossing with Pakistan; another would connect the border with Mongolia to the north and Laos to the south.

Big economies like Japan, China, South Korea, Russia and India certainly would benefit from the trade links a unified highway system would bring, but the project also is designed to help smaller economies and landlocked nations gain coveted routes to major sea ports.

Most of the roads already exist but require upgrading to an international standard — much like the United States in the early 1900s, when smaller roads were cobbled together and improved to form the federal highways U.S. 1 and Route 66. Signs would be unified and border facilities improved to handle an expected increase in traffic.

Funding for most of the preliminary work on the Asian Highway has come from Japan. Further financing is expected to come from bigger nations participating, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.