1906 War Office Folding Map of Yunnan Province, China

This large folding map of Yunnan Province, China, was prepared by British military officer H. R. Davies in 1906 for the War Office. It was the culmination of years of travel and research by Davies, aimed in particular at planning a British railway to Yunnan that could compete with the French Kunming-Haiphong Railway, then under construction. Davies' map represented a major advancement in the cartography of Yunnan at a time when the province was being eyed by both the British and French as an entry point into China and a link with their wider Asian empires.

A Closer Look

Covering the Chinese province of Yunnan, outlined in green, and portions of neighboring territories, including Burma and Vietnam (Tonkin), the map provides a great level of detail on the topography, toponyms, waterways, and other geographic features of the province. Although European missionaries and merchants were familiar with the major routes through Yunnan, mainly along rivers and established mountain passes (some being part of the ancient 'Tea Horse Road'), none had managed to map the deep valleys, steep cliffs, remote villages, and mountain peaks to anything approaching the level that Davies does here.

Kunming is labeled here as Yunnan-fu (云南府), at the center towards right. An extensive glossary with terms transliterated from Chinese, Shan, and Kachin, along with a legend, appears at top-left. Ethnic groups (Shan, Lolo, Miao, etc.) are labeled in red throughout. Some areas remain unsurveyed despite Davies' exemplary efforts, and even portions of provincial borders are not entirely clear - when in doubt, Davies continues the line of a border or river with dashes. An inset at bottom-left marks out the area displayed on the main map in the broader context of East Asia.

Although not apparent at first glance, the main focus of the map is on three proposed cross-border railways, two British and one French. The first potential British railway would link the existing line at Bhamo, a branch off the Mandalay-Myitkyina Railway, to Teng-yueh Ting (now Tengchong), where it would meet an existing line through Yung-Ch'ang Fu (Baoshan) to Dali (Ta-li Fu) on Erhai Lake (Erh Hai), from which more railways would need to be built to connect to Kunming. A second British line, the more ambitious and yet more likely of the two, given the terrain, would link to a just-completed line connecting Lashio (just above the inset map) with Mandalay via Pyin Oo Lwin (the summer capital), a line that includes the harrowing Goteik Viaduct, the largest railway trestle in the world when completed. The proposed line would end at Dengchuan, near Dali, where it too would require a difficult east-west line across Yunnan to connect with Kunming. The French line, the only of the three to be completed, trails south and southeast of Kunming through a border pass along the Red River at Ho-kou and Lao-kai (Hekou - Lao Cai).

Davies' explorations were not exactly secret (he secured a Chinese passport for his travels), but they were very significant. After completing the map, he published the work Yün-nan the link between India and the Yangtze (Cambridge University Press, 1909), describing his travels, which covered thousands of miles within and around Yunnan. With his characteristic assiduousness, Davies calculates that about half of the lands he visited had never seen a Westerner, not even a missionary, and even less had been described in print or mapped.

Historical Context

Aside from its intrinsic benefits as a vastly improved map of Yunnan, Davies' map was also the product of an inter-imperial competition between Britain and France for influence in southern China and throughout East Asia. Both countries had ambitions to gain influence in China by way of neighboring colonies - the British in Burma and the French in Indochina (in the preceding years, France had conquered Tonkin and established a protectorate over Laos). The Qing Dynasty ruling China was in a bad state at the time, reeling from multiple uprisings and wars, and could only hope to balance foreign imperial powers off each other (granting a cluster of multiple leased territories and concessions to the British, French, Russians, and others at the end of the 19th century). Qing control over the distant 'barbarian' peoples residing in the mountainous borderlands of Yunnan was quite limited in any event. Many of the groups labeled in red here had linguistic, familial, and trade ties that paid little heed to the (poorly mapped and demarcated) borders between China and its neighbors.

Although France had a significant cultural presence in China through Catholic missionaries, its commercial presence lagged far behind the British (in fact, France was one of the few countries to run a trade deficit with China in the late 19th century). Yunnan - which is traversed by most of the major rivers of East and Southeast Asia, including the Yangtze - offered an opportunity to revive French dreams of profiting from the China trade. Any notion of making all of Yunnan a colony or protectorate were fanciful, not least because Britain and other powers would resist it, but a 'sphere of influence' emanating from recently-conquered Tonkin offered the best chance for expanding the French presence in Yunnan. The Kunming-Haiphong Railway, an ambitious scheme to link Hanoi's port with Yunnan's provincial capital, became the centerpiece of this effort.

The notion of building a railway between either Burma or Tonkin and Yunnan can be traced back years prior; even in the 1850s, some British officials imagined a 'line of commerce' into Yunnan along the Salween and Irrawaddy Rivers. But the practical difficulties of building a railway through a terrain of rainforests, sheer cliffs, steep mountains, and raging rivers were daunting. However, the aforementioned imperial competition combined with improved technology and prior experience building railways in difficult environments made the project feasible. With regard to a cross-border Yunnan railway, although the French had a head start, the British had more experience building railways in similar terrain and their project had more commercial justification, linking Yunnan with Rangoon. However, the French pushed the Qing authorities to reject British requests for a concession to build the Burma-Yunnan Railway. Pressing ahead at considerable cost in terms of funds and lives (more than 800 coolie laborers died building a single bridge), the French managed to construct the railway in six years (1904 - 1910). It was an engineering marvel, including dozens of tunnels, trestles, embankments, and other means of building a level grade through distinctly unlevel land, drastically reducing a journey that would have taken nearly a month by preexisting methods. But the project did not lead to a virtual French colonization of Yunnan as hoped - although the French did establish outposts at stations along the railway akin to mini concessions, and trade did flow through Haiphong, helping it develop into a modern port for Hanoi, the economic benefits and expected imperial prestige fell far short of justifying the costs.

These railways, both constructed and unrealized, have had an interesting postimperial history. What were once seen by Chinese nationalists as a source of humiliation and imperial exploitation became vital lifelines against the even graver threat of Japanese domination in the 1930s and 1940s. During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 - 1845), the Kunming-Haiphong Railway was a vital source of supplies to the Chinese government in Chongqing, prompting a Japanese intervention in Tonkin that eventually led to a break with the U.S. and the Pearl Harbor attack. The British and Chinese also reconsidered building the Yunnan-Burma Railway to supply Chongqing, opting instead to build the Burma Road, which likewise motivated a Japanese invasion of Burma. Since World War II (1939 - 1945), the Kunming-Haiphong has symbolized the ups and downs of Sino-Vietnamese relations and was ground zero during their 1979 border war. In recent years, the construction of railways through these mountainous borderlands has been a major initiative in China's relations with its neighbors, with Yunnan, and Kunming in particular, again being seen as the main link between China and Southeast Asia.

Publication History and Census

This map was compiled by British Army officer Henry Rodolph Davies in 1906, based on his own extensive explorations in the region as well as pre-existing maps (cited at bottom-right), including those by the Survey of India. It was prepared for the War Office's Topographical Section of the General Staff, the British Army's cartographic military intelligence outfit. This is the first edition of the map; a more common second edition was produced in 1908 and included with copies of Davies' book Yün-nan the link between India and the Yangtze (Cambridge University Press, 1909) (This book was republished in 1970 by the Ch'eng Wen Publishing Company in Taipei and in 2010 by Cambridge University Press, but original examples are fairly scarce now). The map was also reprinted in 1941 as tensions between Britain and Japan increased (this region saw considerable bombing as the Allies sought to use Yunnan, including the Kunming-Haiphong Railway, as a means of supplying their Chinese allies, based in Chongqing). As for the map itself, other known examples are generally in poor condition, and we have only seen one other example (a 1908 edition) that is dissected and laid on linen as here. The only other known examples of the 1906 edition in institutional collections are held by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the National Library of Australia.