Burma Road

History

The road is 717 miles (1,154 km) long and runs through rough mountain country. 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. 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 the most efficient route for supplies to reach the Chinese interior via Nanning on November 24, 1939 in the Battle of South Guangxi and later through French Indochina (September 1940). 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 500 miles through rural Yunnan terrain before ending up in Kunming.

In July 1940, Britain yielded to Japanese diplomatic pressure and closed the Burma Road for three months. 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.

The Allies recaptured northern Burma in late 1944, which allowed the Ledo Road from Ledo 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. The first convoy reached Kunming on February 4, 1945.