Independent (UK): Baotou was of little interest to the outside world for millennia. When one of the first visitors reached its walls in 1925, it was described as “a little husk of a town in a great hollow shell of mud ramparts”. Some 84 years later, this once barren outpost of Inner Mongolia has been transformed into the powerhouse of China’s dominance of the market in some of the globe’s most sought-after minerals. The Baotou Rare Earth Research Institute is home to some 400 scientists whose work has …