Kunming, China's 'City of Eternal Spring'

In 1910, a French initiated narrow gauge railway connected Kunming with Vietnam’s Hanoi and Haiphong. However, it was the World War II that really saw Kunming and other parts of southwestern China develop. With Japanese advancements across eastern parts of China industrial plants, administration and even universities were relocated to the area, hopefully out with the range of enemy bombers. Many educated, skilled people settled, for example, in Kunming. It also became a strategic supply base both with the overland Burma Road via Dali and the air corridor created "over the hump" from India. Between 1941 and 1942 the heroic "Flying Tigers" were based in Kunming.

Postwar, the city benefitted from such relocated academic and technical expertise to develop rapidly as an industrial centre. That period also saw the opening up of southwestern China by what can only be described as incredible railway engineering achievements. 1,134-kilometer-long Chengdu-Kunming (Chengkun) Railway was constructed between 1958 and 1970. Traversing extreme terrain via hundreds of tunnels and bridges it remains today as a recognized monument to outstanding railway achievement. Another key project was opening of the "Nankun" line in 1997 connecting Kunming with Nanning in Guangxi. It considerably shortened freight and passenger time to/from Guangdong and even Hong Kong.

In July 1995, I travelled from Beijing to Kunming on a 47-hour train ride that took in part of the Hunan-Shanghai-Kunming (Hukun) Railway. Although easy to have flown from Beijing to Kunming, I wanted to see the landscape and to experience a railway penetrating through some of China's more difficult terrain. It would also take me through parts of Guizhou and hopefully see something of the ethnic groups inhabiting that remote upland plateau.