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Wanding and the Dian-Burma Road
She was there, albeit only a trail, when spice and tea
caravans made their tortuous journeys westward out of China.
She was there when Kublai Khan's Mongolian warriors came storming down
from China to conquer Burma after a colossal battle a hundred miles
northeast of here with the army of the King of Mian (Burma).
She was there when Marco Polo rode up from Mandalay and crossed into
China on his fabulous travels in Asia during the 13th century.
History and legend know her as the Burma Road, a 548-mile route
running from Kunming, the capital of China's south western province of
Yunnan, to Wanding, here on the border with Burma.
But until 1920 she was little more than a path that passed across
towering mountains, over great rivers, through gorges and plains, and
villages ignorant of motor vehicles.
During that year construction was started from Kunming to make it more
than a trail. But it took more than a dozen years for 160,000 Chinese
with teaspoons and mattocks and their hands to carve the one - track
light - surface road out of the mountains, some almost 11,000 feet
above sea level.
After the Sino - Japanese war broke out, the road was opened to
Wanding, to which the Burma government by then had built roads to
connect with their Irrawaddy River ports of Bhamo and Rangoon and with
the railhead of Lashio.
The road became China's lifeline as some 3,000 overseas drivers and
mechanics and administrators were brought in to transport needed
military supplies from Burma.
But in 1942 the Japanese gained control of the Burma termini of the
road. The defending Chinese, in an effort to stop the advancing
Japanese, blew up the vital, Salween River Bridge and destroyed 25
miles of the road along a section of the Salween River canyon.
In September, 1943, with Col. Leo Dawson, a U.S. Army engineer in
charge of the project, reconstruction of the road was begun, with the
Chinese furnishing engineers and up to 30,000 laborers at a time, as
well as supplies and materials.
Completed by mid - August 1944, the road connected with the newly
built Ledo Road from India to Bhamo, Burma,in territory held by the
Chinese, and it was soon carrying more tonnage than ever.
Land transports have been using the road ever since, albeit it has
changed time and again, following new paths. Instead of going through
some of the larger towns, she skirts them. There are places where she
has abandoned her old route and taken a new, straighter and less steep
route.
To travel this modern thoroughfare - they now call her the Kunming -
Wanding Road - is to take a journey that lifts the heart and brings
pleasure to the eye.
We recently spent five days travelling from one end of the road to the
other.
Once you get out of Kunming, the City of Eternal Spring, she becomes a
6 - lane toll road, with a median strip of flowering shrubs and
blooming flowers, and flanked by forested hills and terraced farmlands
where fields of yellow rape seed raise their heads to the sun.
But she soon narrows into two lanes that can almost handle four cars
abreast.
We see new sections, paralleling the old route, under construction,
not with hand labor but with modern equipment - huge bulldozers and
earth movers.
Tankers and trucks and tractor-trailers share the road with pony carts
and herds of goats.
Along the road stand new houses of adobe brick painted white with
pumpkin - colored doors framed in glittering red.
Slash - and - burn lands that stood stark and bare when we came this
way six years ago now shimmer with the green of reforestation.
We cross the Star Sent River and farther on stop to listen to the
Roaring River.
All the trees within reach of the road wear a four - foot coat of
white paint on their trunks which makes for safer driving.
At a mountain pass, a pack train of 17 donkeys rests on the side of
the road in the shade of fir wood trees.
We come into Dali,an ancient fortified town, now painted in glittering
red and gold, known for her handsome mottled gray marble.
Palms rustle in the breeze and snow shimmers on the mountains.
At Dali, if you turn right, you go to Lijiang and Tibet. But if you go
straight on, as we did after a detour of several days in the north of
Yunnan, you follow the Burma Road to Wanding.
From Dali the road crosses two mountain ranges that tower almost
11,000 feet into the clouds.
At three check points before we reach Baoshan, police check our
passports because we are now in border territory where drug smugglers
pose a problem.
Giant banyan trees spread their many arms above the road.
The countryside dazzles with its beauty. Water buffalo work in the
paddy fields. Men and women with great knives move through the fields
of sugarcane.
Then we come into Wanding. And here at the Wanding River Bridge, on
the border with Burma, the road now ends.
Editor's Notes: The new Dian-Burma Road was finished in
1995. |
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