Ye Shaoguang sits in his mud-and-brick home, waiting for the next explosion. It's June, and his living room is filled with the bounty of rural Hunan: freshly plucked bayberries and ceramic jars of fresh honey from his bee colony. He ladles dark yellow syrup into a bowl. "Eat it," he says. "It's wild honey, like nothing you'll get in the cities." (Related pictures: "Chinese High-Speed Rail in Focus.")

Beyond Ye's front yard is a rice field, and beyond that, a gaping hole in the side of the valley: a tunnel being blasted through the mountains. When completed next year, the Zhangjiashi tunnel will allow trains to race 200 miles (320 kilometers) an hour between the southern metropolis of Kunming and