The Yunnan–Burma railway, 1860s–1940s: Imagining, planning and rejecting a railway that was never built

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, British commercial interests in Asia and back home visualised a railway connecting British Burma with inland China, which they saw as a vast unexplored market. British engineers and adventurers were then employed by the commercial bodies to investigate the economy and geography of Yunnan and Upper Burma for the project. The railway was eventually rejected by the British as being unviable and unprofitable. The colonial knowledge created by these missions (in the form of travelogues, survey reports, interviews and studies) was later interpreted by Chinese nationalists as evidence of Britain's ambitions to colonise southwest China in 1905 (the Russo-Japanese War) and 1927 (the Northern Expedition) when the Chinese nation was in deep crisis. But the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War led the Chinese Nationalist government to reconsider the Yunnan–Burma railway as necessary infrastructure for obtaining foreign supplies to save the nation. The colonial knowledge produced by British explorers and merchants earlier was reinterpreted by the Nationalists to try to persuade the British authorities to construct the Burma section of the railway. By tracing the history of this failed project, this article argues that nationalist understandings of colonial infrastructure were far from fixed and consistent. It recounts the circulation of colonial knowledge on the Yunnan–Burma railway from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, showing how different nationalist agents in Asia interpreted and reinterpreted colonial infrastructure at various critical periods.