A diverse community of China's ethnic minorities come together in a marketplace in central Yunnan Province. [Photo by Erin O'Brien]

Stopping in Chuxiong for a late morning snack from a noodle vendor, a crowd of children gathers around the group of Western tourists. They attempt to appear nonchalant, but can’t resist a few surreptitious peeks to watch the lao wei – foreigners – handle a bowl of noodles with chopsticks.   

Chef Mom of this family enterprise allows them a few moments of fun before shooing them away from her customers, but she too is curious and sits down at a nearby table to keep an eye on her new customers. It is a March morning and the chill is quickly dissipating. The road has been awash in a golden light reflected off endless fields of rapeseed in bloom, a common crop from which canola oil is derived. Here Yunnan’s ever-present mountains, many permanently snow-capped, are never out of view. It is a welcome interlude on this cycling trip along the Burma Road. 

Cycling in China? The response is most common among those travelers who have trudged en masse along the Great Wall near Beijing, shuffled through the terracotta warrior exhibit in Xi’an, peered through the haze at the Bund from Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Television Tower. 

It would never occur to the average tourist in China to navigate by bicycle, even when rush hour traffic is composed as much of bicycles as by cars. But further afield, where populations are fewer and open land more abundant, China is a paradise of cycling opportunities.

Cycling involves the traveler in a sensory experience unlike any other.  One is immersed in the smell of noodles cooking on a woodstove, the clopping of hooves as farmers drive their horse drawn wagons to market, the feel of the morning warming to a sunny afternoon and the sight of mist lifting off a staggering landscape of terraced fields. From the Shandong Peninsula to Guanxi’s eerie karst hills along the Li River, bicycles afford an opportunity to experience rural China at a leisurely pace. 

The Three pagodas of Dali are reflected in a pond at the foot of Mt. Cangshan. [Photo by Erin O'Brien]

For the more driven cyclist, Yunnan Province beckons with what the Yunnanese call “the Beauties of Nature and Culture.” Yunnan is home to half of China’s plant and animal species, most of them in the province’s tropical region of Xishuangbanna to the north of Laos. But the rest of the province is surprisingly rich in flora and fauna. Yunnan Province lies in the thick of the planet’s most active tectonic plates, and geological events are manifest in the hot springs, volcanoes and glacial valleys throughout the province. The world’s largest collection of dinosaur fossils was discovered at Lufeng, adding to Yunnan’s claim as the “hometown of dinosaurs.” 

The province’s combination of altitude and latitude accounts for a profusion of azaleas, camellias, orchids and other rare and exotic plants. Coral trees grow wild next to banana palms and tropical fruit is increasingly abundant as we approach the border. Water buffalo swim in rivers and ponds and the temples and pagodas have a southeast Asian character. Women of the Dai minority wear sarongs and carry umbrellas on their shopping excursion, and the hustle of Beijing or Shanghai couldn’t be further from the mind.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, Cangshan (Jade Green Mountain) is smallish by locals’ standards at 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). But it towers over the fertile valley to the east, casting its shadow over Erhai Lake and the ancient walled city of Dali.

Erhai Lake provides one of the most sublime cycling opportunities in China; the road encircling the 250 square kilometer lake brings cyclists in contact with horse drawn carriages, fishermen plying the lake waters, traditional stone architecture of the Bai minority people and temples featuring the local village gods. Many of these are given over to the goddess Guanyin, whose fabled passage through the region is credited with its prosperity.

After its defeat in the 8^th century of the Tang Imperial Army, Dali exerted considerable influence over southwest China and into southeast Asia as the seat of the Nanzhou Kingdom. The kingdom embraced Yunnan and what is now the north of Myanmar (Burma) until falling to Kublai Khan’s armies in the 13th century. It was during that era that the importance of the famed Burma Road was first established.

A vital link long before WWII

Although considered an engineering milestone when its reconstruction was completed in 1944, the old cobblestone road that passes between Lashio, Myanmar, and Kunming, China, had historical significance as a trade route in and out of China long before World War II. Though less celebrated than the northerly Silk Road popularized by Marco Polo in his Travels, the route also hosted Marco Polo on his crossing from Burma and played a role in the ancient silk and tea trade, providing a southern route from Chengdu to India and Southeast Asia.

During China’s anti-Japanese war, the Burma Road and its intersecting partner, the Stillwell Road which goes into Ledo, India, were the key to getting supplies into China through the back door during the Japanese occupation.

Its importance diminished by a new (and separate) expressway, the Chinese portion of the Burma Road meanders westward from mile-high Kunming, dubbed Spring City for its year-round pleasant climate, to the tropical border at Wanding, at a mere 1,400-foot elevation. Along the way, are bastions of traditional Chinese culture, gardens and architecture in Heshun Baoshan and Dali; Ruili, with its casinos, night markets and all-night entertainments, and finally the border itself, where Burmese influences in dress and signage dominate. 

In completing a voyage from sub-alpine highlands to tropical river valleys, the journey is a feast for outdoor enthusiasts. Lacking the traffic and industry of China’s more prosperous – and populated – provinces, Yunnan’s most striking features are of the natural world: 5,000-meter peaks (16,000 feet) are not uncommon here, and the rivers have a wild and pristine quality before they disperse into the more placid Yangtze, Pearl, Irawaddy  and Mekong rivers. Cycling here is a three-season opportunity; only the monsoonal rains of July through September make navigating the twists and turns of this ribbon of history undesirable.

One of the ancillary functions of China’s thoroughfares has been to bring diverse cultures together, and Yunnan is probably the best place in China to continue that tradition. With 25 of China’s 52 national minorities represented, the province is a wealth of cultural color, and traditional dress is commonplace in the province’s markets and festivals.  Most minority groups are found in autonomous prefectures, where they can maintain their tribal language, customs and festival days. 

On any given day in Yunnan, it is likely that there is a festival happening somewhere in the province. West of Kunming, the Sani and Yi people have the highest profile, with colorful embroidered headdresses of the various clan groups a distinctive  feature of the rural roadside. The Bai people have a 3000-year history in their prefecture near Dali, where women in bright red and white dress come to sell their famous tie-die fabrics. Observing the process of making these fabrics is a fascinating diversion in the lakeside villages, as the traditional butterfly and flower patterns emerge on an indigo canvas. 

Continuing southwest, one may stray into other minority areas such as Zhuang, Jinpo or ethnic Tibetan before encountering the predominant Dai villages closer to the border.  

Commerce is alive and well on China’s border, where trucks line up for miles transporting goods back and forth. In the tradition of China’s historical trade routes, there is a diverse multiculturalism at work in Wanding; more religions and ethnicities are represented in this smallest of Chinese cities than in much larger cities anywhere else in the country. Signs in Sanskrit, Myanmar, Chinese, English, Thai and sometimes French compete with the clash of color and manner of dress of a broad spectrum of nationalities. There, operating with capitalistic abandon in a special economic zone, merchants from Pakistan, Nepal, India and Myanmar pursue a thriving trade, continuing a tradition as old as the Burma Road itself.