1875: Death of a British Diplomat
After Britain's 1852 annexation of lower Burma lucrative trade with China through its back-door seemed more than a distant possibility. But after a successful first mission up the Irrawaddy and into Yunnan in 1868, the second British mission six years later ended in tragedy.
A Lahu minority Christian service in a hill village near Menglian.
C. Patterson Giersch: Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier
Yunnan was not always China: indeed not so long ago large parts of Yunnan were only nominally part of the empire. To make Yunnan, outside the main Han cities, a Chinese province required significant effort. Here Giersch's study on Yunnan's hinterland makes an interesting if academic read.
A number of Chinese historic texts covering life and politics in Yunnan have survived over the centuries. I have translated a few of them.