Qinghai province in northwestern China, home to about five million people, is considered a gateway to Himalayan Tibet.
The Qaidam basin in Qinghai has quantities of natural gas, and the Tarim basin holds both oil and gas.
An earthquake in April that struck a main producing area in Qinghai province is part of the reason, traders say.
Four days later, police in Qinghai's capital, Xining, detained a prominent Tibetan intellectual, Tagyal (he has a single name, as do many Tibetans).
In Gansu and Qinghai Provinces and throughout north-central China, people of nine different ethnic groups share a music tradition known as Hua er.
In January 2011, Zhang was arrested by the Yunnan police on charges of defrauding the state in purchasing stakes in Qinghai Salt Lake Industry Group.
FORBES: Jailed Chinese Investment Tycoon Returns To Billionaire Ranks
In the first 11 months of 2012, the 80 major steel makers posted a loss of 1.97 billion yuan, said Wang Qinghai, chairman of the association, during a meeting this weekend.
And unthinkable until recently in Guangdong province in the south and Qinghai in the west, not one of the 29 police chiefs at the administrative tier below the province, the prefecture, is also the political-legal head.
The quake in the mountainous region had flattened homes -- many of which were made with wood and earth -- and other buildings in Jiegu and elsewhere in Yushu prefecture, a Tibetan region of Qinghai.
Gangs of workers are rebuilding the Beijing-to-Lhasa road that crosses the Qinghai and Tibetan plateaus: a government minister says China will build 150, 000km (about 94, 000 miles) of new highways in western China over the next decade.
According to the court documents, between 2006 and 2008, Zhang collaborated with several investors to acquire shares of Qinghai Salt Lake Industry Group under the name Yunnan Xingyunxin Investment, which is affiliated with the state-owned firm Yunnan Tobacco.
FORBES: Jailed Chinese Investment Tycoon Returns To Billionaire Ranks
The government will be nervous of any news from Qinghai's disaster that could give further ammunition to domestic critics of the shoddy construction of schools in Sichuan that was widely blamed for the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 earthquake.
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