Many international books and journals on Second World War history in the Far East carry an old photo of a band of 10-wheel GMC American army trucks gingerly crawling round the sharp zigzag turns of a mountain road in Southwest China. The photograph illustrates the formidable condition of the Burma Road as the captions invariably describe the wartime international supply line that started in India, passed through Myanmar and ended in Southwest China.

But when people wanted to return to the road in the old photo recently to refresh their memory of that important part of history, they found no one knew where the road was exactly located. All they knew was its nickname, "24-zig," because of its 24 zigzag turns within a length of 4 kilometers. Nearly all the books and journals mention that the "24-zig" was located within the territory of Southwest China's Yunnan Province. As a matter of fact, the road had long been seen as a proud symbol of the doggedness shown by Yunnan people in the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45). But Ge Shuya, a Yunnan-based expert on Southwest China's Second World War history, overturned all previous media accounts earlier this year. He announced that the "24-zig" was located in Guizhou, the neighboring province of Yunnan.
And he also discovered that local people in Guizhou have known about the "24-zig" all along but had made no effort to correct such reports.

In his article, "Searching for a 'road on a photo'," which first appearing in the 4th issue of this year's Cultural Geography, a Yunnan-based periodical, Ge said that 20 kinds of domestic or overseas publications or websites had almost all said the place was a part of the Burma Road or Stilwell Road. In the West, the Burma Road is generally seen as a part of the Stilwell Road. In the National Martyrs Cemetery in Yunnan Province's Tengchong County, an amplified version of the famous old photograph was even exhibited with a caption saying "located in this county." A serious scholar, Ge spent about 10 years searching for the exact location of the "24-zig."

In 1995, Ge joined a Yunnan TV Station crew to produce a documentary about the history of the Burma Road as a part of the local celebration for the 50th anniversary of victory in the Second World War and the War of Resistance against Japan. One of their missions was to find the legendary "24-zig." Before setting out, the team consulted many scholars, writers and veterans familiar with that period of history, as well as retired pilots who flew across the region during the "Hump Lifting" campaign, which ensured supplies of daily necessities and ammunitions to Chongqing, China's wartime capital, and other cities in Southwest China. These experts pointed out the most likely locations of the "24-zig" along the Burma Road. After shuttling along the old course of the Burma Road for several times and covering all possible districts suggested by the experts, the team failed to find any locale resembling the twists and turns in the photo. They decided that it must have disappeared from Earth. Then news reached Ge, saying some Chinese had seen the "24-zig" in the northern part of Myanmar.

Meanwhile, he learnt from a friend over the Internet that Mokuyama Kohe, editor of a photo-album in Japan focusing on the Yunnan-Myanmar war field, suggested that the "24-zig" might be in China's Guizhou Province. From December 2001 to January 2002, Ge traveled along the Burma Road all the way to Lashio in Myanmar, where the Burma Road started, to investigate the history of the Chinese Expeditionary Forces fighting there. He did see a mountain road with very deep valleys and eight zigzag turns, which bears some resemblance to the "24-zig."
"But I knew at once that it wasn't the one," Ge recalled.

Ge felt that he had searched the whole course of the Burma Road, including 184 kilometers in Myanmar. Ge then set out immediately to see if he could find it in Guizhou. A senior employee of the Bureau of Road Administration of Guizhou's Anshun City told him the place might be located in another part of the province. Ge went to the long-distance bus station and showed the old photo of the so-called "24-zig" to the drivers. At a mere glimpse of the photograph, a few veteran drivers told him that it was about one kilometer from Qinglong County in the direction of Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province.
"You just ask for '24-zig' there and everybody will tell you," Ge quoted the drivers as saying. As Ge soon found out, everybody knows "24-zig" in Qinglong County, which is a key pass for people driving from Kunming to Guiyang, capital of Guizhou.

On March 1, Ge finally arrived at the "24-zig." After a half-day's adventurous and exhausting mountain climb, he found the precise spot where the unknown photographer shot the world-famous photograph about 57 years ago. In order to capture the full view of the "24-zig" in his lens, as his predecessor did, Ge had to stand on a cliff just 30 centimeters from the edge. "Standing dizzily at this dangerous height, I respected the professional spirit of the unknown photographer more than ever," Ge said.
After the international supplies reached Kunming -- the terminal of the Burma Road during the Second World War -- they had to be transported further, passing through the "24-zig" to the final destination of Chongqing. "The altitude of the '24-zig' is so high that when it wasn't clear, driving there was just like driving above clouds and fog," a contributor recalled in an article published in the Beijing Evening News in March. Although he did not give his name, he claimed in the article that he was a veteran truck driver of the Kuomintang army and had driven along the "24-zig" during the war as part of a half-month training course for recruits.

In the autumn of 1943, the Chinese Government made an effort to improve the dangerous conditions of the road and the "24-zig" was turned into the "21-zig," which is how it remains. Zhou Ming, an official at the Bureau of Communications of Guizhou Province, said in an interview on the Internet: "The '24-zig' is so dangerous that we built a new road on a neighboring slope at the end of the 1960s. Now the '24-zig' only has very light traffic. The road is of historic significance, so instead of renovating it, we've just maintained its original features."

As a historian, Ge could not stop without pinpointing the origin of the error. "The mistake was mainly due to the different definition of the Stilwell Road and the Burma Road held by Westerners and the Chinese," Ge said. The Burma Road, stretching from Lashio in the northern part of Myanmar to Kunming in Southwest China, was built in 1938 by the Chinese people when the Japanese began to occupy a greater part of China. But for all those who participated in the heroic efforts of fighting the invaders, the whole stretch of road from Myanmar to Chongqing including the "24-zig" was the Burma Road. Ge said his "rediscovery" of the "24-zig" astonished him. Experts and scholars could not believe that an assertion held by almost all of them was wrong.

But the "24-zig" is relevant whatever the debate. Perhaps in the future, those who left stories there during the war can return to recall the glory and hardship of their common past, along which 736,374 tons of goods were conveyed to China, while 468 planes and the lives of 1,579 US pilots were lost.

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