The Burma Road () 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.Voy: Burma Road
History The road is 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.Seagrave, Gordon S., Burma Surgeon, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1943 The construction project was coordinated by Chih-Ping Chen.
+ Burma Road (Operational October 18, 1938) Modern Name Imperial/Historical Name Feature Type Lashio Lashio (British Burma) Terminus Wanding Wanting (romanized) Border Crossing Longling Lungling City Huitong Bridge Huitongqiao Bridge (Salween River) Baoshan Paoshan City Gongguo Bridge Gongguoqiao Bridge ("Lancang" Chinese river name, "Mekong" international) Dali Tali-Fu City Chuxiong Tsuyung City Kunming Yunnan-Fu Terminus
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.Lorraine Glennon. Our Times: An Illustrated History of the 20th Century. October 1995. 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.Winston Churchill. The Second World War, v. VI, chap. 11. The first convoy reached Kunming on February 4, 1945.
In media Burma Convoy (1941) Kukan (1941) A Yank on the Burma Road (1942) Bombs Over Burma (1942) The Battle of China (1944) Objective, Burma! (1945)
Further reading C. T. Chang: Burma Road, Malaysia Publications, Singapore 1964. Forbes, Andrew; Henley, David (2011). China's Ancient Tea Horse Road. Chiang Mai: Cognoscenti Books. Jon Latimer: Burma:The Forgotten War. John Murray, London 2004, . Smith, Nicol (1940). Burma Road: The Story of the World's Most Romantic Highway. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Tan, Pei-Ying. The Building of the Burma Road. Whittlesey house, 1945. Webster, Donovan : The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II. Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, 2003, .
See also
Ledo Road China National Highway 320, which the Burma Road is now a part of Tea Horse Road, ancient Silk Road segment over the same area Hangrui Expressway, the modern road along this route Yunnan-Burma Railway Burma Road (Israel), wartime makeshift named for the original Burma Road
References
External links
Merrill's Marauders: Protecting The Burma Road Burma Road photos WW2 - Campaigns in Burma World War II Burma Road video WWII - Why We Fight - The Battle of China 1943 video 1 WWII - Why We Fight - The Battle of China 1943 video 2 Life-line to China Re-Opened, 1945/02/12 (1945) Universal Newsreel The Ghost Road Mark Jenkins, Outside (magazine), October 2003 Blood, Sweat and Toil along the Burma Road Donovan Webster, National Geographic Magazine, November 2003 China to Europe via a new Burma road David Fullbrook, Asia Times, September 23, 2004 On the way to MandalayThe Sydney Morning Herald, August 16, 2008 Los Angeles Times, "Burma's Stilwell Road: A backbreaking WWII project is revived", December 30, 2008. Transcribed copies of Joseph Warren Stilwell's World War II diaries are available on the Hoover Institution Archives website, with the original diaries among the Joseph Warren Stilwell papers at the Hoover Institution Archives. Transcribed copies of the World War II diaries of Ernest F. Easterbrook, Stilwell's executive assistant in Burma (as of 1944) and son-in-law, are available on the Hoover Institution Archives website, with the original diaries among the Ernest Fred Easterbrook papers at the Hoover Institution Archives. For tours along the Burma Road.