Burma Road

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This article is about the Sino-Burmese road. For other uses, see Burma Road (disambiguation).

Burma Road and Ledo Road

Allied lines of communication in Southeast Asia (1942–43). The Burma Road is shown at far right

The Burma Road is a road linking Burma (also called Myanmar) with the China. Its terminals are Kunming and Lashio, Burma. When it was built, Burma was a British colony.

The road is 717 miles (1,154 km) long and runs through rough mountain country.^[1] The sections from Kunming to the Burmese border were built by 200,000 Chinese laborers during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and completed by 1938. It had a role in World War II, when the British used the Burma Road to transport war materiel to China before Japan was at war with the British. Supplies would be landed at Rangoon (now Yangon) and moved by rail to Lashio, where the road started in Burma. After the Japanese overran Burma in 1942, the Allies began to fly supplies over the eastern end of the Himalayas and, under the command of General Joe Stilwell, built the Ledo Road to connect Assam in India to the Burma Road through territory in the far north of Burma still in allied hands.