Golmud

About Golmud

Golmud is a county-level city in the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai Province, China. It is now the second-largest city in Qinghai and the third largest on the Tibetan Plateau (after Xining and Lhasa). The population in 2020 was 221,863.

Golmud is a romanization of Oirat Голмуд, meaning "rivers". Ge'ermu is the pinyin romanization of the Mandarin pronunciation of the same name's transcription into Chinese characters; it is sometimes spelled Geermu. Ko-erh-mu was the same name romanized using the Wade–Giles system; Golmot was the romanization used by the Chinese Postal Map. The Wylie romanization of the Tibetan form of the name is Nagormo.

Golmud is a young city. It was first established in 1954 when the Transportation regiments of Qinghai-Tibet Corps set up a food distribution base, staffed by 10 people, at the current location. In May of that year, construction on the Qinghai-Tibet Highway commenced. Scientific exploration of the mineral resources of Qarhan were undertaken in the 1950s, leading to the discovery of the area's potash and gas fields. Systematic surveying was undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s, with the railway permitting...

Overview adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.