Burma Road
The Burma Road (also Burma Road ) (滇缅公路) is the only route between the modern traffic Burma , now Myanmar , and the People's Republic of China . The Burma Strait was an important link between the Republic of China and the sea during the Pacific War . When it was built, Burma was a British colony. At that time, China's economic future was primarily dependent on raw material supplies from the colonies of Great Britain and France . To cut off supplies from the Chinese troops, the Burma Strait was often besieged and blocked by enemies such as the Japanese army . Today a railway line stretches from Rangoon to Lashio , followed by a road via Kunming to Chongqing , which was opened in 1939.
The road is 1154 km long and winds through very rough, mountainous terrain. The section between Kunming and the Burmese border was built by about 200,000 Chinese workers between 1937 and 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War . Before Japan entered the war against the British, the Burma Road was used to transport all kinds of supplies to China. Under massive diplomatic pressure from the Japanese, the British closed the Burma Road on April 17, 1940. However, after the Japanese were unable to negotiate peace with the Chinese despite further diplomatic efforts, they reopened the supply route on October 17 of the same year. In 1942 the Japanese overran the British in Burma, so that supplies for the national Chinese troops in Chiang Kai-shek were only possible by air (→ The Hump ).
Under British command, Indian , British and American units retook northern Burma. There they built a new road, Ledo Road , which reached from Ledo , Assam through Myitkyina to Burma Road near Wandingzhen in Yunnan , China. The first trucks reached the Chinese border via this route on January 28, 1945.
literature
- CT Chang: Burma Road . Malaysia Publications, Singapore 1964.
- Donovan Webster, The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, ISBN 0-374-11740-3 .
