Road linking Burma (Myanmar) with southwestern China opened in 1938
This article is about the Sino-Burmese road. For the 1948 Siege of Jerusalem, see
Burma Road (Israel). For Japanese-built wartime railroad in Southeast Asia, see
Burma Railway.
The Burma Road (
Chinese: 滇缅公路) was a road linking Burma (now known as
Myanmar) with
southwest China. Its terminals were
Lashio, Burma, in the south and
Kunming, China, the capital of
Yunnan province in the north. It was built in 1937–1938 while Burma was a
British colony to convey supplies to China during the
Second Sino-Japanese War. Preventing the flow of supplies on the road helped motivate the
occupation of Burma by the
Empire of Japan in 1942 during
World War II. Use of the road was restored to the Allies in 1945 after the completion of the
Ledo Road. Some parts of the old road are still visible today.[1]
History
The road is 717 miles (1,154 km) long and runs through rough mountain country.[2] The sections from Kunming to the Burmese border were built by 200,000 Burmese and Chinese laborers during the
Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and completed by 1938 in order to circumvent the Japanese blockade of China.[3][4] The construction project was coordinated by
Chih-Ping Chen.
During
World War II, the
Allies used the Burma Road to transport
materiel to aid China's war effort, especially after China lost sea-access following the loss of
Nanning in the
Battle of South Guangxi. Supplies from San Francisco for example would land at Rangoon (now
Yangon), moved by rail to
Lashio where the road started in Burma, up steep gradients before crossing into China over the
Wanding bridge. The Chinese stretch of the road continued for some five hundred miles through rural
Yunnan terrain before ending up in Kunming.[3]
In July 1940, Britain yielded to Japanese diplomatic pressure and closed the Burma Road for three months.[5]: 299 The Japanese overran Burma in 1942, closing the Burma Road. The Allies thereafter supplied China by air, flying "over
The Hump" from India, which initially proved fatally dangerous and woefully inadequate, leading U.S. army general
Joseph Stilwell to obsessively pursue the goal of reopening the Burma Road.[3]
The Allies
recaptured northern Burma in late 1944, which allowed the
Ledo Road from
Ledo, Assam to connect to the old Burma Road at Wanding, Yunnan province. The first trucks reached the Chinese frontier by this route on January 28, 1945.[6]
Donovan Webster: The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II. Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, 2003,
ISBN0-374-11740-3.
Smith, Nicol (1940). Burma Road: The Story of the World's Most Romantic Highway. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.[ISBN missing]
Tan, Pei-Ying. The Building of the Burma Road. Whittlesey house, 1945.
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