via The Irrawady, 17 March 2020: Plans to build a railway between Myanmar and China are over 150 years old. This story traces the history of attempts to connect the two regions by rail – there’s an industrial archaeology project in here somewhere.
The 19th century also saw a global railway-building boom, as continental interiors were connected by the construction of extensive railway networks. The British looked at the transcontinental railways being built by the US and Russia, and worried that rival powers were overtaking them in this race to reach internal markets and natural resources. The first railway line in India—34 kilometers from Bombay to Thana—was built in 1853, and within 20 years, a network of 3,800 km had been created.[6]
One of the best-known amateur railway enthusiasts in 19th-century Burma was Archibald Ross Colquhoun, who spent years proselytizing for the railway. Born at sea off the Cape of Good Hope, Colquhoun’s first job was as an assistant engineer to the Public Works Department in Tenasserim (now Tanintharyi) in 1871. While accompanying an official expedition to northern Siam in 1879, he converted to the idea of a railway, “to which so much of his life and the greater part of his financial resources were to be sacrificed”, as his wife Ethel Colquhoun put it. Basically, he “hoped to best the French in this race for the trade of the rich province of Yunnan”.[7] In 1880, Colquhoun set off on a self-funded trip from Canton to Mandalay, aiming to survey a route for the railway. For Colquhoun, southwest China in the 1880s was a pristine frontier “wilderness”. In his 1883 book about these travels, Across Chryse, he reported that Yunnan was “still practically untouched”.[8] These ideas fit his imperialist worldview—cemented in his later years as a member of Rhodes’s Pioneer Column, the first administrator of Mashonaland (northern Zimbabwe), and in retirement, as a fellow of the Royal Colonial Institute and editor of its journal, United Empire.[9]
Source: Tracing the More Than Century-Old Dream of Building a Myanmar-China Railway
