The handful of shiny new buildings sprouting out of a barren landscape of dusty steppe and rusting shipping containers is an incongruous sight. One of them, a sparkling tower of marble and glass, is empty aside from a duty-free shop on the ground floor. Next door, a shop sells Russian honey and Chinese ladies’ shoes, displayed side by side.

This is Khorgos, the dividing line between China and Kazakhstan. And while it may not look like much now, China has ambitions to transform this border point at what was once the edge of the Russian empire into a new gateway to the west.

“East meets west. It’s here. This is the linking point,” says Hicham Belmaachi, commercial director of a newly-built dry port at the border, designed to speed up the transit of Chinese goods via Xinjiang on their way to central Asia, Europe or the Middle East.