Twenty-Four Bends 二十四道拐

About Twenty-Four Bends

The Dian-Qian highway on which the 24 Bends sits was first built in 1927, continued in 1935 and completed the following year; the 24 Bends section was surveyed, designed and built under the civil engineer Zou Yuesheng, known as a 'road magnate.' The pass it crosses, between Qinglong mountain and Mopan mountain, was formerly called Yaguan, Wuyaguan or Banguan, meaning a pass even a crow struggles to fly over. The 6-metre-wide road winds up the mountainside in an S-shape, built mostly over karst rock.

During the war the road became a landmark section of the 'Stilwell Road': international aid reaching Kunming via the Yunnan-Burma road and the Hump airlift had to travel the Dian-Qian highway through the 24 Bends to reach the front and Chongqing, and in the later war years vehicles ran day and night carrying supplies through here. To meet a demand of transporting 15,000 tonnes of strategic materiel a month, the US Army's 1880th Engineer Battalion was stationed at Shaziling in Qinglong (in 1942 by a Xinhua report, in 1943 by a Guizhou Daily report) and, with local labourers, widened, straightened and repaired the road despite Japanese bombing and material shortages. About 450,000 tonnes of weapons, ammunition, fuel and other strategic materiel are estimated to have passed through the 24 Bends to the front during the war, and in 1945 photographs of the road taken by the US Army photographer John Alberts were published in National Geographic magazine, making it a symbol of China's wartime international transport corridor.

After the war a new road was built alongside to bypass the old pass and protect the 24 Bends, which fell quiet until, from 2006, the State Council listed it as a national key cultural relic protection unit; it was named to the first national list of anti-Japanese-war memorial facilities and sites in 2014, made a national patriotic-education demonstration base by the Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department in 2015, and approved as a national AAAA tourist attraction in 2017.

What to look for

• The 24 Bends road itself, its S-shaped switchbacks climbing 250 metres in vertical height over a 4-kilometre run on a 60-degree slope.
• The Yaguan pass between Qinglong mountain and Mopan mountain that the road crosses.
• Shaziling, where the US Army's 1880th Engineer Battalion was stationed during the road's wartime widening and repair.
• The 24 Bends exhibition hall, from whose doorway the Xinhua report says the whole sweep of the road can be taken in at a glance.

Location & getting there

Getting to Twenty-Four Bends

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 二十四道拐 with 黔西南布依族苗族自治州 and 晴隆县.