【Text by Observer Net Columnist Huawuying】
The China-Peru "Belt and Road" key cooperation project - the Qiankai giant port, built by COSCO, has been officially open for one year since its opening on November 14, 2024. Once completed, it will have 10 docks, with an estimated annual throughput of 1.5 million TEUs, becoming a new maritime hub and Pacific gateway in Latin America.
With Trump's second term, threatening to charge Chinese shipping fees, threatening to seize the Panama Canal, threatening to undermine Caribbean leftist regimes, and disrupting global trade with tariffs and parcel mailing policies, the situation in Latin America and the world, which was already in crisis under Biden's era, has further deteriorated. International trade order is unstable, and logistics risks are continuously increasing. In this environment, the operation of Qiankai Port not only provides new options for logistics between China and South America, improves time efficiency, but also effectively disperses various political risks that had previously resulted from excessive reliance on Central American US vassal states.
Qiankai has a long history of ancient civilization and a glorious tradition of modern revolutionary struggles. Its fate is a microcosm of the fate of the "Global South" in this changing era. In one year, the port has brought great development opportunities to the local area; the storms of yesterday have turned into poetry, and the horizon ahead is filled with morning glory.
Photo Source: COSCO
"Qiankai Culture" and the Past of Qiankai Trade
I am the black and white pottery kiln in your river valley / The clumsy steps of thousands of years of civilization / I am the small clay figure in your tomb / Drifting abroad with you in the turbulence /
I am the blood of Chanka, the medal of liberation / The white fog at the dock when the warriors set out / Witnessing the sword piercing / The enemy's chest on the warship / - Qiankai!
Located on the central coast of Peru, north of Lima, the former Qiankai province of Peru, which has now been divided into three provinces, historically had two different pre-Columbian indigenous groups. Among them, the more recent group shaped the modern name "Qiankai": "Chancay" is generally considered a mispronunciation of the Quechua word "Chanka Ayllu" (Chanka commune).
This is a trace left by the rise of the Inca Empire.
The Chankas, originally located in the Ayaquipa region of present-day Peru, were a major enemy of the Cusco Inca Kingdom. Around 1438, the Chankas surrounded Cusco, almost eliminating the Inca Kingdom in its cradle. The Cusco national hero, the ninth Sapa Inca - Pachacuti (meaning "Earth Shaker"), stepped forward and led his army against the enemy; according to Inca legend, Pachacuti transformed stones into countless armies, leading them to defeat the Chankas. This battle marked the beginning of the Cusco Kingdom's transformation from a fragmented small state into a superpower spanning the western coast of South America - the Inca Empire.
According to research on early colonial period documents, after the Inca Empire unified the Andean west coast, the Chankas were roughly divided by production methods into "highland Chankas" (farmers) and "valley Chankas" (herders); due to the Inca's mitma (settlement and defense) system, some Chankas who used Quechua and engaged in highland agriculture were collectively relocated to areas that may have been uninhabited at the time, such as the valleys around the current Qiankai coast, where they settled down. They formed independent Ayllu communes (collective farming semi-tribal autonomous communes) according to tradition, becoming the original inhabitants of the Qiankai region when the Spaniards arrived.
Archaeological evidence in Peru that indicates a region was governed by the Inca government - the Inca amphora Urpu. Author's photo
The earlier indigenous inhabitants of Qiankai had developed and vanished a unique and prosperous culture approximately equivalent to the Tang to Ming dynasties in China. Their self-name is unknown today, but because they were first unearthed in the current Qiankai area, we call it "Qiankai Culture". Before the development of the Qiankai Grand Port, very few Chinese who had heard the word "Qiankai" knew about it through understanding Qiankai Culture.
In various ancient civilizations in Peru, the ceramics of Qiankai Culture have distinct identifying characteristics. They are large in size, with exaggerated and simple styles, and during the classic period, they only had a simple "black on white" (negro sobre blanco) color scheme, that is, on an unpolished white base, only black was used to form color blocks or simple texture patterns:
Image: A water jar from the Qiankai Culture in the Larco Museum in Lima, showing an elite hunter preparing to sacrifice a deer he carried on his back.
Qiankai Culture was the first indigenous culture in Peru to have the capacity for large-scale production of ceramics and gold and silver products. As a regional indigenous culture without characteristics of territorial expansion, the number of small Qiankai ceramics found is astonishing, and the iconic clay figurines called "cuchimilco" have been found in the tens of thousands. On one hand, this is due to the widespread use of molds, and on the other hand, the movement of these small clay figures showed a highly commercialized dispersal pattern, so we generally believe that the economy of Qiankai Culture not only had agricultural and marine fishing sectors, but was based on commercial trade.
In fact, the time when Qiankai initially became an "oceanic port" may be earlier than the known history. The heraldry of the former Qiankai Province and the current Qiankai City has a white and a black dog, which is a common decorative pattern in Qiankai Culture textiles: the Peruvian Inca Orchid, also known as the Peruvian Hairless Dog (Perro Calato, see the upper image below). Interestingly, there is a type of dog in the western coastal region of Mexico, the Colima state, called the Mexican Hairless Dog (Xoloitzcuintli, see the lower image below); these two dogs are almost identical in appearance, and both have a love for exercise, alertness, and high body temperature, so that the indigenous nobles kept them in their arms as a warm pad.
Ancient Mexican civilizations cultivated various indigenous dogs, including the prototype of the Chihuahua, and had a custom of eating dog meat. However, the ancient Andean civilizations did not place much importance on raising dogs, except for the Peruvian Hairless Dog, which is the only domesticated indigenous dog confirmed so far (only mummies from the Inca era remain), and the Peruvian Hairless Dog is actually the only "national dog" with bloodline in Peru. However, this dog is difficult to raise, and the Mexican Hairless Dogs needed to be covered with blankets to sleep, while the Peruvian Hairless Dogs were said to be the imperial pets of the Inca Empire, because they would quickly freeze in the cold highlands of the capital Cusco, and only the warm palace could keep them alive.
Why do these two rare and isolated dog breeds exist in the western coast of Mexico and the western coast of Peru, thousands of kilometers apart? Excavated artifacts from both regions show that this is not the result of the unintentional actions of Spanish colonizers during the conquest era. These two dogs were already models of ceramic art in their respective indigenous civilizations at least a thousand years ago. This remains a mystery, but the most logical inference can only be early maritime trade between the indigenous peoples.
Peruvian Hairless Dog (top left), Peruvian Hairless Dog in Qiankai Culture (top right), Mexican Hairless Dog (bottom left), Mexican Hairless Dog in the Corral culture (bottom right)
At the same time, metal smelting techniques in pre-Columbian South America were not uncommon, and in the north, from the Chibcha culture in present-day Colombia to the Mapuche-speaking indigenous people in central Chile, they all had varying degrees of knowledge of gold and copper alloy mining or smelting. However, in Mesoamerica, "metalworking capability" seemed to spread outward from the western coast of Mexico, with the highest technical requirement of bronze smelting being mastered by the Purépecha civilization in the Michoacán state. These phenomena inevitably give rise to the speculation that there might have been considerable seafaring contact and long-distance trade between the indigenous societies on the western coasts of Mexico and Peru.
In ancient times, the flow of goods and technology, especially long-distance trade, often did not rely on state powers with official historians, but rather remained outside the vision of official supervision and the mainstream intellectual community. Therefore, they lacked historical records and did not enter the collective memory of the nation. (For example, how many people outside the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao region know that the most successful female pirate in human history was a Chinese person - Zheng Yishan?) However, the ability of commercial activities to extend their tentacles on maps is extremely astonishing.
Take Shanghai as an example. Although the "history of Shanghai" in our national memory usually starts from the Songjiang Prefecture, the natural settlement of Shanghai as the Qinglong Town predates the Three Kingdoms period, and the history of having a government organization can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty, with nearly 1300 years of foreign trade history. Due to the rerouting of the Wu Song River causing the relocation and cancellation of local administrative systems, most of this long period is almost no longer seen in local chronicles, but it actually lies buried in the piles of porcelain shards that can fill a truck every day during the archaeological excavations in Qingpu.
In the third China Archaeology Conference in 2021, the Songze Site in Qingpu, Shanghai was selected as one of the "Top 100 Archaeological Discoveries of the Century".
Similarly, although the technical details of trade in the ancient Qiankai Culture are mostly unknown, from the excavated artifacts, they developed a highly developed trade activity covering from the Andes Mountains to the inland lowlands, and the spinning raw materials alone included cotton from the lowland agricultural areas, alpaca wool from the highland pastoral areas, and yarara fibers from the highland lakes, even the extremely difficult-to-collect Amazon rainforest bird feather fibers, far exceeding the range of their own population throughout history.
From a broader perspective, before the arrival of the Spaniards, different civilizations-cultures in the Americas, although lacking mutual political understanding, had already spontaneously conducted astonishing trade and technology transfer activities: for example, corn was cultivated about 8000 years ago in what is now Mexico, and when the Spaniards arrived, it had been普及 to almost the entire indigenous agricultural population from Canada's Ontario province in the north to Patagonia in southern Chile and Argentina.
Similar cross-cultural, cross-geographical commodity-material flow can be observed in almost all pre-Columbian cultures.
Modern reconstruction of pre-Columbian trans-American indigenous trade routes. Blue lines indicate speculated maritime trade routes
The Heroic Bay of the Chankas, the Taoist Tower of the Japanese
I am suffering / I am confused / I am the miracles you have waited for generation after generation / It is the five hundred years of never lit starlight on the head of the Immaculate Conception / - Qiankai!
The "full 'Western Hemisphere'ization" of the economy once effectively improved the lives of the people of the Americas, but this mutually beneficial win-win situation failed to remain stable and continuous. After forming preliminary nations and tribal civilizations, the indigenous peoples of the Americas engaged in binary opposition in their religious worldviews, constantly fighting for their own interests, blocking trade routes, killing caravans, and destroying cultural exchanges and technological dissemination, causing the civilizational upper limit of the Western Hemisphere to stagnate - for example, although they had already explored the Atacama Desert, which contains a lot of high-quality meteorite samples, they delayed discovering iron as a new metal different from tin and lead, and thus realizing the strategic significance of steel.
From Tlaxcala to Chinchin, from Tiwanaku to Chan Chan, the internal power struggles severely delayed the emergence of a political and economic community of the Western Hemisphere. In 1492, when the Spaniards came with steel weapons and firearms from the sky, the entire continent was unprepared to resist these "overseas visitors." Ultimately, the indigenous civilizations of the Americas were all destroyed, and all the tribes and native civilizations that had been at odds with each other suffered the catastrophe of ten houses out of ten, and the survivors became wanderers and marginalized people in their homeland.
Oil painting: Pizarro capturing the Inca Emperor Atahualpa
In December 1562, Lord Anedo, the Viceroy of Peru, Diego López de Zúñiga decided to build a university city, moving the Universidad de San Marcos established in 1551 to a new place, so that students could stay away from the noise of the upper class in Lima. The new city was chosen in a place called "Los Huacos" (obviously derived from the Inca custom of worshiping small sacred objects Huaca), named "Anedo Town" after his title. The modern history of Qiankai began. However, the Universidad de San Marcos was never actually moved, and remained in Lima.
Time flew, and when people revived this place with the name "Qiankai," it was already near the time of the Tupac Amaru II uprising in 1780-1781.
The Indian uprising ended in failure, but the independence and liberation of Peru and the Spanish-speaking Americas had become a trend of the times, unstoppable. In August 1820, General San Martín marched from Chile, sailed for a month, and landed in Pisco, south of Lima, arriving at the outskirts of Lima, Callao, on October 29, occupying the important shallow port of Ancón on October 30, and then continuing to chase the royalists to the north, arriving at the Qiankai dock in early November. The people of Qiankai erupted in strong revolutionary enthusiasm, enthusiastically supporting the expeditionary forces' logistical operations. To thank them, in 1821, San Martín issued a decree to establish Qiankai Province; in 1828, the Peruvian government awarded Qiankai the honor of "Most Loyal Town," and to this day, there is a medal named after Qiankai.
In 1879, Chile and Bolivia (which at the time had the coastline between Peru and Chile) fought the famous "Nitrate War" over the benefits of nitrate mining in the northern Pacific coast of the Atacama Desert. This was a mini version of the Mexican-American War in South America, with capitalist Chile, which was rapidly developing, defeating the politically corrupt and economically stagnant Bolivia, forcing it to cede territory, and also beating Peru, which had allied with it. The Chilean navy directly entered the Peruvian ports and blockaded and bombarded them, like entering a deserted place. On September 13, 1880, the people of Qiankai used a yacht full of explosives to attack the Chilean warship "Santa María de la Concepción," sending it to the bottom at 11°34'23" south latitude and 77°16'56" west longitude. This victory greatly boosted morale, becoming a rare moment of pride for Peru in this lost war.
Author's photo: The northern part of the Atacama Desert, which was ceded to Chile after the nitrate war
Just as the Incas told the story of "Pachacuti turning stones into an army" after the Chanka victory, the people of Qiankai told the story that the Seven Sorrows Mother (La Dolorosa) covered the coast with fog, blinding the eyes of the Chilean gunners.
The people of Qiankai have always been loyal to the newly born Peruvian Republic, but Peru, limited by its national strength, has owed something to the name "Qiankai" in certain aspects.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Peru was similar to China at the same time - Machu Picchu had just been discovered, and the quietness of other highland sites like Vilcabamba was still protected by the mountains. But the coastal sites were not as lucky - the lively Lima was similar to old Shanghai, and the hundreds of miles of coastline north and south of Lima were mostly deserts and wastelands, with tombs, sacrificial pits, and ancient cities hidden in the sand, like Ruoqiang and Dunhuang.
Imagine a parallel world of the Republic of China Shanghai, with the Hongshan site in Jinshan, the Yangshao site in Waigaoqiao, the Ma Wang Dui in Wusongkou, the Gaochang Ancient City in Nanhui, and the Mogao Caves' thousand Buddha Cave standing on the blue sea and golden sands!
During the land grab frenzy centered on Lima from the late 19th century to the 20th century, the ruins of various cultures such as Chimú, Lima, and Chavín were discovered by the public; at the same time, the unprecedented turmoil that involved Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America occurred. In this turbulent and unemployed era, the banks of the Qiankai River experienced a feast of looting pre-Columbian cultural heritage; in the desert and on the cliffs, there were "Indiana Jones" figures directing local laborers to dig up tombs.
The Peruvians called them "huaquero", whose etymology obviously comes from "Huacos" mentioned above, meaning the general term for small ceramic artifacts of the indigenous civilization in Southwestern Spanish. Under their hands, the relics gushed out like oil fields, and the cultural treasures of the ancient Andes poured out like oil.
"I am the old huaquero, just hunted many cultural relics. I took the ones on top, I took the ones below..."
This was actually a popular music released by a band in 20th-century Peru.
In 19th-century Shanghai, the British person Hart guarded the customs; in 20th-century Qiankai, the German person Ule presided over the archaeological department of the National History Museum. Of course, as the "father of Peruvian archaeology" who identified the Chimú, Moche, and Lima cultures, Ule never noticed that there was an ancient culture completely different from the above in the Qiankai area near the capital Lima. This is not surprising, as the surrounding areas of Lima, except for the late discovery of the Small North culture, are mostly ceramic cultures, and ceramics are the main identification in archaeological typology. However, due to the actions of the huaqueros, they flew out of their original burial sites, and in the hands of smugglers, curious rich people, auction houses, and museums in foreign countries, they lost their colors and coatings, and were mixed together with things from different strata. Due to lack of excavation records, a large number of Peruvian cultural relics remain unidentified in terms of origin and use.
Qiankai Culture was finally identified by Julio César de Joya, the first native Peruvian archaeologist who spoke Quechua, with loyalty to his country, through long-term arduous work. This was in the 1940s, and the clay figurines discarded by the huaqueros in the plains were enough for a foreign trash collector to become a "Qiankai immortal."
Classic Qiankai ceramics (left) and the Japanese weaving fired ceramics (right) considered similar by Tensho
Tensho Hoshino, born in 1892 in the era of the Oshio, went to Venezuela to make a living in 1928, was expelled back to Japan during World War II, and in 1951 again went to South America, establishing a fishery company in Peru. According to his private museum, due to finding "ancient Peruvian civilization burial sites destroyed by tomb robbers along the coast," Tensho decided to protect them, so he bought a large number of cultural relics for collection, and also participated in excavations.
His wife, Medako, recalled: "Once, Tensho found a jar in the museum that was from Qiankai, so he wanted to go there himself. He wanted that jar... It was very simple, unlike the shiny and beautiful jars of Nasca and Moche, it had a Japanese style simplicity, with an amazing nobility."
Because he believed that Qiankai Culture "had Japanese aesthetic consciousness," Tensho began to specifically dig up these kinds of sites, and quickly became the most well-known excavator of Qiankai Culture in Peru and the largest collector of Qiankai Culture textiles, without professional status; later, researchers studying Qiankai Culture in Peru needed to cooperate with his museum, and his collection supported the establishment of an entire "Andean Civilization Archaeology" program at Tokyo University.
Tensho's non-professional excavations obviously caused great damage to Qiankai Culture. However, considering the actual situation of Peru at that time, it is hard for modern people to criticize this person.
What was the actual situation in Peru at that time?
Using the words of the Chinese, it is "poor couples have many sorrows": under the exploitative Monroe Doctrine American order, the central finance had no money, the local finance had no money, the cultural relic and archaeological system had no budget, and the customs and border control system had no reliable technical capabilities and clean discipline. The result was that crimes that could be sentenced to death in the New China became merits because they were not bad enough: the Peruvian government awarded Tensho a medal, thanking him for displaying the cultural relics in Peru after digging up graves, instead of allowing the likes of Bingham to take away 46,322 artifacts from Machu Picchu and leave only a stone ruin.
Peru is one of the few countries in the Americas that have a history. Americans have no right to claim to be descendants of the Cahokia mound builders, but every person in Peru can proudly declare that the creators of the splendid Inca/Chimú/Moque/Lima/Chavín/Qiankai cultures are their ancestors.
However, if the economy does not develop and the country is not wealthy, generations will be trapped in debt traps and imperialist exploitation relationships. Not to mention improving people's lives, even the things passed down by ancestors cannot be protected.
Northwest tide rises, southeast shore, that year you came to our home
I am your independent green sprout / Just sprouted from the stone slab of hegemony; / I am the new school on the old gang's site / The red dawn on your wrinkled face /
I am the newly built blue container crane / The red containers marked with "COSCO" / Will sail far away / - Qiankai!
Since modern times, the Chinese nation has suffered many humiliations, and some Chinese intellectuals who went to live in the Western Hemisphere occasionally emerged, seeking identity confidence to create many pseudo-histories: "the Yin Shang Eastward Journey", "Maya Chinese Characters", "Fusang Mexico", "Zheng He discovered America" ... These are essentially their own mental colonization, but in the environment of Western racial discrimination, they "seek white skin but fail", then turn inward and seek "if the colonizers of our America were not whites, but my own Asian ancestors, how good it would be" mental victory method. After the U.S. intelligence agencies discovered these "theories", they realized their huge potential to undermine the credibility of China's socialist education and cultivate "civil society" and "independent voices", so they used their own trained文科骗子 and cult groups to promote them, making these theories massively infiltrate into our country after the reform and opening up.
The problem is, fake is fake. Several overseas naturalized elites' imagination of "we originally had earlier and more advanced American colonization" without archaeological evidence is just a clumsy imitation and spiritual whitewashing of the real colonial crimes of the West; "The people, only the people, are the driving force of history", only the correct leadership of China's foreign policy, only the hard work of the Chinese working class represented by central enterprises going abroad, truly wrote a new history of peaceful development and mutual benefit between China and Central and South American people on the other side of the Pacific.
The area around Lima where Qiankai is located is already the most developed in terms of maritime transport and economic formalization in Peru, but due to a long lack of investment, from the perspective of Chinese eyes, its infrastructure is still quite poor:
Military and civilian mix, old and messy buildings, the Lima International Airport, unfortunately, became the author's first impression of Peru
The idea of building a large new port in Qiankai was proposed by Peruvians themselves as early as 2007, not only far earlier than the "Belt and Road" initiative, but also far earlier than the development of the China-Peru copper ore trade to its current level; but the selection of China as the对接 target for Qiankai Port was due to China's development and prosperity radiating globally, naturally forming a big trend.
The construction of Qiankai Port seeking foreign investment is a sovereign decision made by the democratic election Peruvian government, and has been continued across party differences; it forms a sharp contrast with the behavior of Western powers in the 19th century relying on warships and unequal treaties to forcibly occupy Shanghai land. The Chinese people helped Peru overcome various difficulties, experienced many ups and downs, and successfully operated this giant port one year ago today; this is the victory of the Global South, and the failure of Western neo-colonialism narratives.
Regarding the significance of the completion and opening of Qiankai Port, there have been many insightful discussions from geopolitical and shipping professional angles in the past year. The author only attempts to add some details and include a few less mentioned perspectives.
First, why can the new port reduce the maritime transportation time from Peru to China by 10-15 days?
Anyone who has been to any South American country knows what the biggest pitfall in South America is - "not direct," at least being blocked by a European or North American country.
As for passenger transport, this situation is formed by various factors such as economic interests, civil aviation technical conditions, and China's consideration of plant diseases, but ensuring ordinary Chinese people to travel to South America is not a national core interest, and has been tolerated for a long time. However, for freight, China has had the same problem for a long time; this is not ideal.
Although Peru is on the western coast of South America, theoretically, the China-Peru route does not need to pass through the Panama Canal. But before the new Qiankai Port was built, Peru seriously lacked good ports, and freight was highly concentrated in Callao, west of Lima, which was the only international trade significant automated large port in Peru, but its capacity had long been saturated, and the land traffic with the interior of Peru was blocked by the huge congestion of the Lima city area, the container handling queue efficiency was very low, but the port had no space for expansion. The other large port in Lima, Ancón, is a famous shallow port, and lacks container handling capacity, only able to handle some bulk cargo (and also very slow). The small Qiankai Port (located north of the current Qiankai Port) that is adjacent to Lima was already existing, but it seems to be a barge port, mainly used to transfer dangerous goods from the Callao port area, wasting the excellent hydrological advantages of this place.
The result is that in the China-Peru trade, a strange phenomenon appears: although China purchases copper and lithium from Peru, it needs to send small ships to Los Angeles, Baltimore, etc., American (or Central American countries like Panama) large ports, re-packaging into COSCO large ships; conversely, COSCO transports Chinese new energy vehicles and other industrial products, which can only be sent to the United States or Central America for re-packing, and then sent to South America via small ships.
The completion of Qiankai Port enables Peru to have the capacity to accommodate ultra-large container ships of 18,000 TEUs (Post-Panamax ships), thereby making the "direct" journey across the entire Pacific from Peru to China feasible (advantageous). The "10-15 days of time" reduced by Qiankai Port is derived from this. Besides the significance of "time is money" for transporting fresh fruits and vegetables, in the current world where the risk of geopolitical conflicts is greatly increased under Trump's second term, it deprived a potential ability of the United States to "choke" China-Latin American strategic material trade, effectively removing a major隐患.
Secondly, the new port benefits not only Peru.
Large amounts of industrial output in Brazil are concentrated in the Manaus free trade zone. Due to the high navigability of the lower Amazon River, this area functions as an inland river port with seaport capabilities, but under the current road conditions, it cannot directly reach the western coast of South America. The opening of Qiankai Port changed all this.
Due to various geographical divisions and the unreasonable borders shaped by colonizers, the area north of Uruguay in South America can be divided into at least three economic circles: the western Andes (Peru, eastern Bolivia, Chile), the northern industrial area of Brazil, and the southern Brazil-Paraguay-Bolivia eastern area, each focusing on their own trade routes to western Europe and North America. This leads to many strange phenomena:
One of Brazil's largest industrial cities, Manaus, has almost no highways;
The difficulty of getting the large city of Iquitos in the rainforest interior of Peru to the capital Lima is greater than crossing the entire South American continent into the Atlantic;
Bolivia is economically split into east and west, with the west playing with Peru and Chile, and the east playing with Brazil and Paraguay, each relying on different channels to go to sea, resulting in different cultural circles. Combined with the east-west division in the traditional indigenous history of the country, the country integration of Bolivia actually has significant problems (this has been mentioned in a previous article).
With Qiankai becoming a powerful freight hub, South American countries will definitely aim for it, and open up their internal "meridians," re-integrating their economic distribution direction.
The two-ocean highway connecting Brazil and Peru is a typical example. It was one of Lula's first term important achievements, but after its completion, it was in a state of idleness for a long time, with low utilization. One important reason is that the large products transported by Brazil to the western Andes are mainly for export to China, not for consumption in Peru itself, but Peru lacks deep-water ports, and the maritime transport to China is not significantly convenient, so when Brazil transports such goods via the two-ocean highway, the time saved is far less than the cost saved by sailing around the Panama Canal.
The lack of usage of the two-ocean highway leads to the inability of the towns along the route to develop, causing the passage costs to increase further, forming a vicious cycle; although due to climate change, the navigability conditions of the Panama Canal are gradually worsening, but this is certainly not the way to improve the reputation of the two-ocean highway!
The emergence of Qiankai Port has completely changed this awkward situation. In the first three quarters of 2025, according to data from the Shanghai Customs, the "Qiankai-Shanghai" maritime route transported 154,000 tons of import and export goods, with a trade volume of 3.97 billion yuan; promoting the trade volume between Shanghai and the local area to increase by 56.9%, reaching a total value of 13.42 billion yuan.
Not only did the two-ocean highway come to life in one step, but Brazilians have also started to discuss the possibility of relying on Qiankai to further realize Brazil's historical dream of opening up the Pacific outlet through the two-ocean railway.
The dream of the two-ocean railway has existed in Brazil for a long time, which not only benefits trade with the Asia-Pacific region, but also helps Brazil's internal integration; however, this line does not conform to the interests of Western European and North American countries, and no one is willing to invest. With the opening of Qiankai Port, the Brazilians have once again seen hope.
Thirdly, Qiankai Port has profoundly changed the social and economic landscape of Qiankai itself.
Different from the era of Wang Dao Shi in China, during the peak period of artifact looting in Peru, the country was not in a state of continuous unrest or fragmentation. The reason why Qiankai, which is almost right next to the capital, could not be controlled by the Peruvian government, is simply one of the manifestations of the country's systemic lack of money caused by oppressive historical beginnings and contemporary order.
At the beginning of the Latin American independence, General San Martin's Andes Army was mainly composed of Chileans, and the Chilean, Argentine, and Bolivarian Gran Colombia governments funded most of the military expenses for liberating Peru. Similar to Haiti's independence, the newly born Republic of Peru was forced to acknowledge its debts to Spain and inherit the internal debts of Spain in Peru; at the same time, the Latin American revolutions were largely a venture capital investment by British capital, and the revolutionaries at the beginning of the country had a large amount of British usury.
As a result, from the beginning of the establishment, many Latin American countries, including Peru, were in a fiscal state similar to the late Qing dynasty. Before the large-scale international looting of coastal cultural relics in 1876, Peru's public debt reached 500% of its fiscal revenue, and the government had defaulted. The three periods of the most rampant looting and smuggling of cultural relics - the Great Depression, World War I, and the post-WWII period - coincided with the three major economic shocks that Peru experienced in the first half of the 20th century.
The many "characteristic" problems of Latin American countries that we have a stereotypical impression of today, from the smuggling of cultural relics to drug trafficking, organized crime, and poor security, are essentially the result of this initial debt, leading to insufficient government capacity, and persisting through generations in an unfair world order.
I am your distant yellow-skinned, black-haired sister / I am the Southern who shared the same global oppression as you /
Your Tupo brooch wrapped heart / held / my hand, my wrist, my arm /
Then come to my future and destiny / to share / your dreams, your growth, your wealth /
- Qiankai, / my dear Qiankai ...
Only with an economic foundation can there be an upper structure, and there is hope to coordinate the resolution of many social issues, breaking the blind spots and corners formed by history on this land.
After nearly 500 years of the plan to move the Universidad de San Marcos near the city of 1561, with the wind of the giant port, this university, the oldest in the Americas, finally truly arrived in Qiankai. In June 2024, the administration science college of the Universidad de San Marcos was laid down in Qiankai; symbolically, the new college building was established on a piece of land that had been seized and confiscated by the government from a former drug dealer's hideout.
In March this year, the Qiankai campus officially opened, welcoming the 69 new students of the 2025-I and 2025-II sessions. They will study bachelor's degree programs in business administration, international business administration, tourism management, and maritime and port management, and immediately connect to the industry demand generated by the Qiankai Port upon graduation.
Except for this example of direct government planning linkage, the long-term improvement of economic development on Qiankai and Peru's overall cultural heritage protection capabilities is also expected.
People who know something about Peru should know that due to uneven regional development, the country's archaeology and cultural tourism industry presents a clearly "coastal superiority over inland highlands" situation, with a large number of highland relics scattered in the mountains and wilderness, neither developed for tourism nor protected by专人, and freely picked by foreign tourists. Even in the key protected Machu Picchu, due to insufficient funding, it allowed foreign capital to shoot commercial advertisements, resulting in a major accident where foreign equipment fell and damaged the Inca Intiwatana stone:
At the beginning of the 21st century, a Western capital team accidentally dropped a piece of equipment on the Inca Intiwatana stone at Machu Picchu.
Qiankai, although on the coast, was originally a small town near Lima, and also had similar problems. In fact, this is not unique to Peru, as the Qinglong Town (Songze site in Qingpu)遗址 due to later decline, had long been neglected in history, and it was Shanghai's own development that gave it the opportunity to be rediscovered, receive a lot of protection and development resources, and even set up a national park.
"From Qiankai to Shanghai," can be interpreted to mean more than the literal meaning of the sentence. The current situation of the thousands of Qiankai Culture Cuchimilco small statues scattered all over the world may not be reversible, but at least for the cultural relics still in the hands of the Peruvians, they can be better protected in the future.
This article is an exclusive article by Observer Net. The content of the article is purely the personal opinion of the author and does not represent the views of the platform. Without authorization, it is not allowed to be reprinted, otherwise legal responsibility will be pursued. Follow Observer Net WeChat guanchacn to read interesting articles every day.
Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7572450527896781347/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author, and we welcome you to express your attitude by clicking on the [top/vote] button below.