In 1941, as the Imperial Japanese Army swept across Asia and the Pacific, no country seemed able to defend itself against its rapid and brutal aggression. China in particular was the target of increasing Japanese invasion and occupation until it no longer had any active seaports under its control. To give themselves an artery to trade with the outside world, more than 200,000 Chinese labourers cut a 700 mile overland route - the Burma Road - from the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming to Lashio, Burma, in less than a year. Lashio was connected by rail to the Burmese port of Rangoon, and through this tenuous system of conveyances the Chinese people were kept briefly supplied with goods from the outside world. But when Burma fell to Japan in early 1942, the Burma Road was severed. The Burma Road tells the sprawling, sometimes hilarious, often tragic, and still largely unknown stories of the war in Burma from the perspective of the soldiers who fought and sometimes died there, and whose recollections bring a largely forgotten chapter of the Second World War into sharp focus today.