The Day the Burma Road Between Myanmar and China Opened
The Day the Burma Road Between Myanmar and China Opened
Somewhere on the Burma Road / US Army Center of Military History / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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By Wei Yan Aung 10 January 2021
YANGON On this day in 1939, the Burma Road, a transport route linking Myanmar (then Burma) with southwest China was officially opened. It was built while Myanmar was a British colony to convey military supplies from Britain and the US to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government of China, which was at war with invading Japanese forces.
The 716-mile-long (1,152 km) road linking Kunming in China and Lashio in Myanmar’s Shan State took some 300,000 workers around 19 months to build at a cost of £375,000 (nearly £25 million, or about 45 billion kyats, in today’s money).