CHINA-INDIA:Assam-Yunnan toll road?

At present virtually all trade goes by slow lumbering ships that have to thread their way through the straits of Malacca, going clean south almost to the equator. And then there’s the loading and unloading at the docks at each end. LA-NY your shipment would be there by truck before they’d have it loaded aboard a ship at the docks in Hong Kong or Calcutta for a week’s voyage at sea and another long unload at the other end!

Of course there’s some of the world’s greatest mountains in the way, and until now politics. Your correspondent spent four wonderful months of his late-teens in India, seeing all major regions of this beautiful country. It was 1958 and Indians were all fired up with nationalist fervor over fierce border clashes with the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army that was attempting to liberate the odd Himalayan cow herder or two from Indian ‘neocolonialism’ and to right some supposed boundary wrong of a British surveyor a century earlier. The Indians responded with great jingoism too. The Indian motherland was calling for a do-or-die struggle to throw the Chinese right out of the mountains and back to the plains...

Fortunately that silliness seems to be all forgotten now. So on a recent visit to China the Indian premier K. R. Narayan and Chinese premier Jiang Zemin signed an agreement to jointly study a highway link. (Reuters 6/5/00) Most of the route within India is pretty straightforward, following east along the south bank of the Brahmaputra River up in the northeastern province of Assam to Dibrugarh. Then up in the tri-border area where India, Burma and China meet there’s a good 350km (220mi) of extremely rugged country where you are trying to cut across the grain of about six major north-south trending river valleys including the Salween, Mekong, Yangste Jinsha rivers, all quite close but divided from one another by massive mountain ranges. Slightly less horrendous geography is presented by a route through northern Burma – Kachin province – but the politics of that area with massive drug warlords and organized banditry could present larger obstacles than the Hengduan mountains of far western China.

Further north again there are plans for progressive upgrade of the old Silk Roads that run from far northern China in Xian province through Tashkent and Samarkand to Teheran and Baghdad to Damascus and Beirut. One branch of the old Silk Roads goes along what is now the northern border of Pakistan, but that is a circuitous and politically difficult link for India.

Way south one route east follows Chittagong to Mandalay in central Burma and the old Burma roads of war-with-Japan notoriety (River Kwai etc) into Yunnan province. That is mainly a Burmese road, and the present regime, one of the world’s most isolationist, rules it out. (Wish my old friend of 1962 to 76, Geoffrey Fairbairn, were still around. He went ‘native’ 1940 to 1945 in northern Burma leading a group of about 100 British-funded Shan guerrilla forces against the Japanese for the war’s duration, and got to know this country inside out, also flying many times in US planes from Mandalay, I think, to Kunming. Though he waxed more lyrical about a wartime ‘wife’ he had there, who he contrived to visit her every year or so right up until he died in about 1976, than he did about transport matters.)

So the key India-China link has to be the quite new central route (2 on the map) Dibrughar on the Brahmaputra into Yunnan and Sichuan provinces either through the northern Kachin tip of Burma or going just north. The Chinese see great trade and tourist potential, and so do the Indians.

What a toll road! The Assam-Yunnan (AY) Turnpike?