Nicol Smith

Armchair travel in China and Burma a la late 1930s when the young author (an American journalist) takes off from Repulse Bay in Hong Kong to drive along the Burma Road just as it was finished being built by two hundred thousand Chinese labourers in 1937-38. Stretching from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in SW China, this 715-mile long road became China's lifeline to the rest of the world when the Japanese bombed and closed off China's last open port, Shanghai, in October 1937.

I hadn't intended to read this book, found on my bookshelves purchased used for $1.50 some years before, but its opening scene on a beach in Repulse Bay, HK (a locale I knew well, having lived in HK for five years), together with the author's descriptions of territories I have travelled through (Chengdu, Yunnan, upper Vietnam and Burma) clinched the deal. This is a youthful, exuberant book of a journey in which everything was still 'fun' despite an escalating Sino-Japanese war, drenching showers, muddied roads that crumbled into bottomless chasms, malaria-ridden plains and orphanages full of blind and abandoned former child slaves.

A book to consider reading if you're looking for a first-hand account of the Burma Road before it turned into the death camp of western troops and their Asian allies, and need a reminder of how young and innocent the world once was.… (meer)