Under the supervision of customs officers, trains carrying 35 containers set out from the Qingdao Multimodal Transport Customs Supervision Center destined for Almaty in Kazakhstan on Jan 30. 

Shandong Landbridge International Freight Forwarding Co provides international logistics services for 16 of the containers. The containers are filled with goods shipped by sea from Malaysia and South Korea, such as auto parts, microwave ovens and lubricants. 

Wang Xin, manager of the company's custom declaration department, said that the goods are transported from East Asia, Southeast Asia and other countries to Qingdao, then loaded onto Central Asia cargo trains for transport to Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries through Khorgos.

It takes only 10 days from Qingdao to Almaty by rail. It is faster than sea transportation and cheaper than airfreight. More and more high-value goods such as microwave ovens are shipped this way. 

This route is faster and cheaper. The normal clearance procedures for goods take only ten minutes. It has become the first choice for logistics between Southeast Asian and Central Asian countries. 

The large logistics channel runs through sea and land, from east to west and back again. It is a high-speed road linking the Maritime Silk Road and the Silk Road Economic Belt. The international trains at the Qingdao Multimodal Transport Customs Supervision Center, destined for routes in Central Asia, Central Mongolia and Central Europe will carry 25,000 TEU containers and 282,000 tons of cargo this year, a year-on-year increase of 16.3 percent and 12.3 percent respectively.

Statistics from Qingdao Customs show that in 2017 Shandong's import and export with countries along the Belt and Road routes totaled 481.63 billion yuan ($75.8 billion), an increase of 16.4 percent, 1.2 points higher than the increase in imports and exports of the province’s foreign trade over the same period.