Owing to the high elevation that towers above the rest of the world Tibet is home to tens of thousands of glaciers that collectively contain the world's third-largest storage site of freshwater after Antarctica in Greenland this has led many to label Tibet as the third pole of the earth
Tibet is also referred to as the water tower of Asia because many of the world's largest rivers begin across the plateau including both the yellow and Yangtze, Indus, Mekong, Brahmaputra, and Zagara rivers these rivers flow from the almost uninhabited and uninhabitable Tibetan plateau down to support hundreds of millions of people downstream across Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and of course china itself
The control of Tibet means the control of the sources for all of these rivers and that means the control of the drinking water for hundreds of millions of people that powers the civilizations from India to china therefore from the Chinese perspective to ensure a continuous and uninterrupted supply of water to her two most critically important rivers and to control the world's third-largest source of freshwater to secure a future where freshwater may be more difficult to come by.
The control of Tibet is an imperative policy to guarantee future security of the state regardless of the optics that an invasion and occupation of the territory had for decades now.
China's geography around her rich eastern plains that constitute her core largely guarantees easy security from invaders in nearly every direction to the east and the south is the ocean while to the west and northwest are the inhospitable mountains and deserts that stretch for thousands of kilometers.
The weak point in china's armor was much smaller and located across a tiny strip of land known as the Hoshi corridor. This is an extremely narrow stretch of land through the western wastelands that's fairly easy to traverse across because it's relatively flat and dotted by oases throughout which pretty much acted almost like ancient gas stations for travelers and invaders alike who were moving across it.
Flanked by mountains to the north and south and surrounded by some of the world's most inhospitable environments the corridor acts as a natural past that leads for nearly a thousand kilometers directly from china's rich core central plain straight to the basin in central Asia in the west
For millennia step nomads from central Asia could use the hash corridor almost like a funnel or a highway to rapidly transport themselves and their horse armies directly into the core open plane of central Chinese civilization which gave Chinese states a difficult conundrum.
During the tang dynasty of the 7th century, they decided that military campaigns were cheaper and through numerous invasions and conquests expanded tang Chinese dominion across the corridor and deep into the Tarim basin with the objectives of subduing and neutralizing the nomads and of securing the vital silk road trade route
Along with being a highway for invaders across both directions the Hashi corridor served as a vital transportation route for trade caravans and merchants and was the most important trade route in northwest china.
Across this route, traders were linked directly between the rich industrial and agricultural heartland of china and the Islamic civilizations of central and western Asia which from there linked directly to the civilizations of Europe.
Trade across the corridor made china rich while bandit raids upon it from the surrounding wastelands interrupted that wealth and so to ensure that the trade continued to flow reliably and to halt the incursions of nomads China steadily expanded her dominion across it and towards the west.
Today the area around the Tarim basin is pretty rich in oil. Throughout the 80s and 90s, the china national petroleum corporation discovered 26 oil and gas-bearing structures across the basin that are estimated to contain approximately 16 billion tons of oil and gas reserves.
Today the basin supplies more than a fifth of china's oil supply and is by far the most significant energy base that china possesses.
So those are the many reasons why over the past many thousands of years Chinese civilization has come to expand from its cradle in the east across the more inhospitable wastelands of the west.
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