As India and China hold talks over disengagement along the LAC, satellite imagery compellingly reveals the standoff in Ladakh was anything but spontaneous.

India Today has accessed what apparently is the original blueprint of the Chinese aggression, depicting Beijing's wargaming on a startlingly accurate model of Ladakh 2,500 km away.

China built the world's largest sand-scale landform in the Ningxia region in 2004 in order to train the PLA for possible Ladakh intrusions in the future.

The training zone, the biggest under China's Western Theatre Command, is nestled in the Helan mountain range.

The Ladakh replica is a huge open-air model, which can be seen from space.

Sized 900m X 700m, it details the entire Eastern Ladakh, including all Indian-claimed areas.

Deployment Patterns

The Helan training base has administrative buildings and barracks for troops to stay.

It houses soldiers for hands-on combat in tents along with their equipment and vehicles, satellite pictures show.

Deployment patterns observed in this location have an uncanny similarity to the Chinese buildup seen east of Finger 4 in the Pangong Tso area.

Both places witnessed semi-circular patterns with exactly similar arrangements of the officers’ tents.

The infantry positions on the Helan mountains also have air defence and artillery, including dugouts for wheeled and tracked self-propelled versions.

China’s PLA does not have a major combat experience since the war with Vietnam and the North Korean campaign.

The Ladakh model was probably designed to help the Chinese troops overcome their shortcomings and prepare them for real aggression in Ladakh.