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Burma Road
Burma Road
Traditional Chinese	滇緬公路
Simplified Chinese	滇缅公路
Literal meaning	Yunnan–Burma Highway
Hanyu Pinyin
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin	Diān Miǎn gōnglù

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] The first convoy reached Kunming on February 4, 1945.^[7]

Films set on the Burma Road

The construction of the road also features in The Battle of China (1944), the sixth film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series.^[8]

References

^ Voy: Burma Road
^ "Burma Road – Britannica Online Encyclopedia". Archived from the original on 2008-11-18. Retrieved 2010-05-04.
^ ^a ^b ^c Bernstein, Richard (2014). China 1945 : Mao's revolution and America's fateful choice (First ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 12–13. ISBN 9780307595881.
^ Seagrave, Gordon S., Burma Surgeon, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1943 ^{[ISBN missing]}
^ Lorraine Glennon. Our Times: An Illustrated History of the 20th Century. October 1995. ISBN 9781878685582
^ Winston Churchill. The Second World War, v. VI, chap. 11.
^ Romanus, Charles F.; Sunderland, Riley (1959). Time Runs Out in CBI (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army. p. 141. Retrieved 28 November 2024.
^ Brinkley, Douglas; Haskew, Michael (2004). The World War II desk reference. HarperCollins. p. 368. ISBN 0-06-052651-3. Retrieved November 1, 2010.