10 Yuan Qinghai - Tibet Railway Opening

The Qinghai–Tibet Railway, completed in July 2006, required solving engineering problems that had no precedent: roughly 550 kilometers of track laid across permafrost that shifts seasonally, at altitudes exceeding 5,000 meters. Chinese engineers developed a system of thermosyphons driven into the ground to stabilize the frozen substrate — a solution borrowed partly from Alaskan pipeline construction and adapted at far greater scale. The line connects Golmud to Lhasa and remains the highest-altitude railway in the world.

The commemorative was struck in the same year the railway opened, making it one of the more immediate infrastructure commemoratives in the modern Chinese silver panda-format series.