Cover Story: How China Unlocked Simandou to Reshape the Global Iron Ore Trade

On an October morning along the Atlantic coast of West Africa, a bulk carrier named Winning Youth waited quietly in the port of Morebaya. It carried nearly 10,000 metric tons of blood-red earth, freshly extracted from deep inside Guinea’s remote southeastern mountains. The iron ore, loaded days earlier on to the first train to run on the Trans-Guinea Railway, had traveled hundreds of kilometers across ridges to reach this point. Soon it would begin an 11,000-nautical-mile voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and into the South China Sea. Its final destination: a steel mill in China.