Tashi Wangdrak prostrated himself for the entire month-long pilgrimage from his remote village of Nagqu County to Lhasa, in Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. This summer the villager crawled on his hands and knees for the whole route and refused to stand upright even once.

He was fulfilling a dream and honoring a commitment to his father - a devout Buddhist, who insisted every man in the family should perform the ritual.

The pilgrim says his knees were swollen and his back ached by the end of the 400-kilometer trek. But he was content with himself, as he watched trains rumble past several times a day, with passengers smiling and waving at him through the windows.

The Lhasa tour took Tashi Wangdrak to not only the famous monasteries but also herbal markets, where he believed the wild caterpillar fungus from his hometown promised yet another fortune this year.

The year before, the lucrative Tibetan medicinal cure-all had doubled his family income.

As Tibetan medicine gains popularity, nearly 1,300 tons of caterpillar fungus and other such Tibetan remedies were sold to other parts of China last year, a 7 percent increase year-on-year, according to the regional government.

The government partly attributes the growth to the construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, which has carried 44,000 tons of Tibetan goods to the rest of China since it opened on July 1, 2006.

The most common products among these include organic farm produce, adornments, herbs, incense, dried yak meat, barley beer and even mineral water pumped from an altitude higher than 5,100 meters.

Meanwhile, the 1,956-kilometer railway has given Tibetan markets a shot in the arm by bringing in 620,000 tons of goods, says chairman of the regional government Champa Phuntsog.

But one year after its opening, debate still rages as to whether the world's highest railway, which cost 33 billion yuan ($4.1 billion) to build, is a boon or bane.

The opening of the railway increased Tibet's GDP by 13.4 percent last year to a record 29 billion yuan ($3.86 billion), with the per-capita GDP topping $1,000.

In 2006, Tibetan farmers and herders reported a per-capita net income of 2,435 yuan ($324), up 17.2 percent year-on-year.

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