Kūnmíng: History

Pre-20th-Century History

The region of Kūnmíng has been inhabited for 2000 years. Until the 8th century, the town was a remote Chinese outpost, but the kingdom of Nanzhao captured it and made it a secondary capital. In 1274 the Mongols came through, sweeping all and sundry before them.

In the 14th century the Ming set up shop in Yúnnánfu, as Kūnmíng was then known, building a walled town on the present site.

From the 17th century onwards, the history of this city became rather grisly. The last Ming resistance to the invading Manchu took place in Yúnnán in the 1650s and was crushed by General Wu Sangui. Wu in turn rebelled against the king and held out until his death in 1678. His successor was overthrown by the Manchu emperor Kangxi and subsequently killed himself in Kūnmíng in 1681.

Modern History

In the 19th century Kūnmíng suffered several bloodbaths. The rebel Muslim leader Du Wenxiu, the sultan of Dàlǐ, attacked and besieged the city several times between 1858 and 1868; it was not until 1873 that the rebellion was finally and bloodily crushed.

The intrusion of the West into Kūnmíng began in the middle of the 19th century from British Burma and French Indochina. By 1900 Kūnmíng, Hékǒu, Sīmáo and Měngzì had been opened to foreign trade. The French were keen on exploiting the region's copper, tin and timber resources, and in 1910 their Indochina train, started in 1898 at Hanoi, reached the city.

Kūnmíng's expansion began with WWII, when factories were established and refugees fleeing the Japanese poured in from eastern China. In a bid to keep China from falling to Japan, Anglo-American forces sent supplies to nationalist troops entrenched in Sìchuān and Yúnnán.

The supplies came overland on a dirt road carved out of the mountains from 1937 to 1938 by 160,000 Chinese, with virtually no equipment. This was the famous Burma Rd, a 1000km (621mi) haul from Lashio to Kūnmíng. Today, Renmin Xilu marks the tail end of the road.

In early 1942 the Japanese captured Lashio, cutting the supply line. Kūnmíng continued to handle most of the incoming aid from 1942 to 1945 when US planes flew the dangerous mission of crossing the 'Hump', the towering 5km (3mi) mountain ranges between India and Yúnnán. A black market sprang up and a fair proportion of the medicines, canned food, petrol and other goods intended for the military and relief agencies were siphoned off into other hands.

Recent History

The face of Kūnmíng was radically altered in the second half of the 20th century, with streets widened and office buildings and housing projects flung up. With the coming of the trains, industry has expanded rapidly, and a surprising range of goods and machinery available in China now bear the 'Made in Yúnnán' stamp.

The city's produce includes steel, foodstuffs, trucks, machine tools, electrical equipment, textiles, chemicals, building materials and plastics.

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