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David Leffman

It is not until my taxi is cruising smoothly down the expressway southeast of Lijiang, having escaped the picturesque but overcrowded maze of tourist-thronged alleyways, that I think to ask my driver her name.
“It’s Ms Jiang,” she says, “you know, like Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek], who fought Mao and then fled to Taiwan.”
She digs around in the glove compartment and hands me her card, having established that my dinosaur smartphone doesn’t support WeChat, an essential app for swapping contact details in mainland China, even out here in remote Yunnan province.
“Isn’t it also Jiang,” I ask, reading her name, “as in Jiang Zonghan?”
“You know about Jiang Zonghan?” Startled, she turns briefly to look at me. “He’s my ancestor.”
Well that was unexpected.
I had been drawn to this corner of Yunnan for my forthcoming project for Blacksmith Books, A Murder in Yunnan, researching the story of a 19th century British trade expedition that ended in disaster some way southwest of Lijiang, along the Myanmar border.
This local Jiang, a decorated general, had been a major player in that drama, as well as an unlikely businessman who had, it appeared, funded what is now the oldest surviving bridge over China’s longest river, our destination today, with my friendly driver proclaiming, “I’m his direct sixth-generation descendant!”

Now, this “oldest bridge” title is contested, and it is mostly down to poor translation. In 1957, China’s new communist government opened a twin-tier rail and road affair some 2,000km downstream in Hubei province, in Wuhan, proudly declaring it “the first bridge over the Yangtze”. But the Chinese for “first” in this case means “No 1” rather than “first ever”, and Jiang’s bridge predates it by almost 70 years.
So here we are, on our way to our Jiang’s bridge, the driver’s Jiang’s bridge, or so I hope. The authoritative Draft History of Qing, compiled from official records in the 1920s, names the crossing as Jinlong Qiao, the Golden Dragon Bridge, apparently referencing the vast cost of its construction.
But Ms Jiang is certain this bridge is not the one I’m looking for. “No, the Jinlong bridge wasn’t built by Jiang Zonghan,” she says. “He built the old bridge over the Lancang River, way to the north of Lijiang.”
This is at a place called Zili and, confusingly, I’ve already met locals who referred to Jinlong Qiao as the Zili bridge, after another Zili village on the far side. So which of these bridges is actually connected to Jiang? I am not entirely sure, but it must be fortuitous to be driven to whichever one this is by a member of his family.
Though obscure today, during the 19th century Jiang’s bridge lay astride one of Yunnan’s many tea-horse roads, named after the major produce trafficked along them by mule train.

Jiang Zonghan hadn’t always seemed destined to leave his mark on history. Born in 1838 during what would be China’s last peaceful years for more than a century, he was from a remote village high in the dry, forested ranges south of Lijiang.
The Yi people were an aristocratic, slave-owning society and, according to author Yang Kai of the Yunnan Ancient Tea-Horse Road Research Association, Jiang was from their lower ranks, indentured from an early age to a wealthy family. Originally he was known as Jiao Ah Liu (Jiao Sixth), but his surname was later sinicised to “Jiang” when he managed to join the army.
“Jiang and his master’s daughter eloped and reached the ancient ferry on the banks of the Yangtze,” says Yang, filling the historical gap with a bit of local folklore. “The ferryman saw what looked like a ragged servant accompanying a lady dressed in gorgeous clothes. He knew that something was up and deliberately refused to let Jiang Zonghan onto the boat unless he paid more. With the greedy boatman in front of him and the family’s vicious thugs close behind, he jumped into the river and swam across.”
An enchanting tale, but from what I’ve seen hiking alongside a fierce stretch of the river, further upstream at Tiger Leaping Gorge, such a crossing seems unlikely.
It was a tumultuous time in China back then: foreign invasions, civil wars with body counts in the millions and then there was that centuries-old dynastic collapse.
In 1855, Yunnan’s substantial Muslim population, their status declining under the Chinese administration, launched a province-wide uprising. The rebels sacked Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, and took the old walled town of Dali, some 150km south of Lijiang, from where they ruled the region for more than a decade.

Historically, Jiang Zonghan first surfaces in the Draft History of Qing, as a soldier serving under Yunnan warlord Yang Yuke. William Gill, a British officer, explorer and spy, would write that Yang’s large following – a private army really – and reputation for ferocity in battle made Chinese authorities nervous he might defect to the rebel cause. But Yang stayed loyal, and it was his forces that finally broke Muslim resistance and recaptured Dali in 1872.
Jiang played a decisive role in the fall of the town, leading troops over the Cangshan range behind Dali in a surprise attack. In the aftermath, Jiang was appointed acting brigadier-general with batulu rating – awarded for bravery – and posted south to Tengchong, the last city in China before the Myanmar – then Burma – frontier.
And it was three years later at Tengchong that Jiang became embroiled in an international incident known as the Margary Affair, named after an interpreter and junior diplomat guiding a British expedition between Myanmar and China.
The British were looking to pioneer a trade route that would give them access to the markets in China’s heavily populated southwest, which were too remote to make transporting foreign goods all the way from eastern coastal ports economically viable.
In a letter home to his family – published posthumously – Augustus Raymond Margary described meeting Jiang at Tengchong in late December 1874: “I called on the general yesterday, and had a very civil reception. His name is Jiang, and he is much famed for a daring military feat which brought about the fall of Dali […] He has a calm sphinx-like countenance, and a charming smile. Yet this man slew thousands of Mahommedans on that day without quarter. It was his birthday, and he was giving a fête to the people. A ‘sing song’ was progressing in front of the audience dais, and I had my interview in the presence of two or three hundred citizens, who thronged the courtyard.”
But the timing was bad: with the Muslim uprising barely suppressed and peace only slowly returning to this volatile border area, the British expedition to which Margary was attached, protected by a sizeable contingent of armed guards, was mistaken for an invading army, perhaps even coming to restore Islamic rule. Despite carrying protective passports issued by the imperial court in Beijing, the expedition was ambushed at the village of Mangyun, between Tengchong and the Myanmar border, and Margary and his five Chinese staff were killed.

When news got out, hot-headed editorials in Shanghai’s English-language North China Herald, convinced the incident had been plotted by the abrasive governor of Yunnan, Cen Yuying, clamoured for an all-out war with China to avenge Margary’s death. Britain’s far more measured political representative at Beijing, Thomas Wade, instead demanded a huge financial indemnity and territorial concessions, and organised an investigative team to travel to Yunnan.
Meanwhile, Chinese authorities also launched an inquiry. As described in the Report of the Chinese Commissioners’ Investigations and Findings in the British National Archives, they rounded up a dozen “bandits” (or innocent amber merchants, according to one informant), took them to trial in Kunming, convicted them of killing Margary and concluded that no regular Chinese troops had been involved. But the imperial government reluctantly bowed to British demands that somebody in authority be punished. For failing to prevent Margary’s murder, Jiang and two other military officials from Tengchong were cashiered.
Yunnan is remote, however, and within a year Jiang had been quietly reappointed to his post at Tengchong, where he helped suppress yet another uprising, this time led by a disgruntled military officer and a vagabond priest.
In early 1885 he followed his mentor Yang south to fight against the French annexation of northern Vietnam, which China considered to be its own protectorate. Yang was killed that March at the Battle of Zhennan Pass. Jiang survived and emerged from the campaign a first-rank official. He was later appointed overall commander of forces in Guizhou province.
Military record aside, Jiang also flourished in a completely different field. Back in 1876, freshly returned to Tengchong after the Margary Affair, he founded the Fuchunheng company.
According to a plaque at Fuchunheng’s former headquarters, in Kunming, the company traded in “silk, jewellery and medicinal herbs”. It also dabbled in finance, held a supply contract for the military, ran a string of stabling inns on Yunnan’s trade routes and eventually established offices in Sichuan province, Hong Kong and Myanmar. In 1886, Jiang diverted profits from the business to personally fund his bridge across the Yangtze. It was completed in 1890.
I have no doubt this is the right place … but Ms Jiang is embarrassed, admitting that she has been here only once, many years ago, and had confused the Jinlong and Zili bridges

We’ve left the expressway for a long, steep slalom down into the Yangtze gorge, following what eventually becomes a rough concrete track, covered with loose stones and orange soil that has tumbled down from the hills.
The route runs out at the little cluster of houses and bamboo groves comprising Jin’an village, below which, finally, is the bridge – whichever bridge this will turn out to be: 16 heavy iron chains decked in wooden planking strung out across the Yangtze, the 90-metre-wide river coloured an unlikely vivid blue. Covered piers at either end protect wooden name-boards carved with the three characters for “Jinlong Bridge”.
There is a photograph of Jiang Zonghan, plump and middle-aged, hung with festive red ribbons. A memorial tablet nearby reads: “The General’s Merits are as High as the Sun and Moon”.
I have no doubt this is the right place, and I don’t say anything, but Ms Jiang is embarrassed, admitting that she has been here only once, many years ago, and had confused the Jinlong and Zili bridges. Either way, looking upon the structure out in the middle of nowhere, I think, why is Jiang’s bridge here at all?

Though obscure today, during the 19th century Jiang’s bridge lay astride one of Yunnan’s many tea-horse roads, named after the major produce trafficked along them by mule train.
Similar suspension bridges have been built since at least the 16th century in Yunnan, whose far western corners are cut by deep gorges containing the upper reaches of three of Asia’s great rivers, the Yangtze, Mekong and Salween.
Without these bridges, trade routes across the region would have required enormous detours or, of course, relied on ferries. But ferries were painfully slow if you had livestock to ship across. Mule trains often comprised scores of animals and were notorious for capsizing in seasonally rough waters with the loss of all on board, spawning local tales of ravenous river monsters.
Jiang’s bridge greatly improved access along a significant, if back-road, caravan trail from Lijiang towards Kunming and neighbouring Sichuan, and it is possible that by funding it, Jiang was investing in his own business. The official story, however, is that he built the bridge to honour a filial vow.
According to the Peking Gazette of September 4, 1890: “In obedience to the dying requests of his parents, Jiang Zonghan, Brigadier-General in Guizhou, has erected a chain suspension bridge over the Zili river [the Yangtze] at Heqing in Yunnan, his native place, and has further set apart a piece of land the annual income of which is to be applied for the maintenance of the bridge in a state of repair, the total contribution amounting to over 14,000 taels. […] As a reward for the liberality thus displayed by Jiang Zonghan, the memorialist asks His Majesty to give permission for the erection of a memorial archway in honour of the donor’s deceased parents, inscribed with the usual honorific inscriptions”.
The Draft History of Qing offers another explanation: that as a soldier, Jiang had been cornered here on the banks of the river by rebel Muslim forces, and swore to build a bridge if he survived.
Researcher Yang Kai supplied a more vengeful version of this story, too: it was after the ferryman refused to carry him across the Yangtze that Jiang vowed to build a bridge here, to put the man and all his descendants out of business.
Standing on-site, the romantic folklore does seem more plausible. The crossing point has a little beach on one bank, a low reef of rock on the other – a perfectly logical place to operate a ferry service, and not too far to swim, if you had to. Today, however, a hydro dam immediately upstream has tamed the river, and the idea of Jiang swimming across might have appeared far less likely beforehand, when the Yangtze’s waters must have torn through this narrow canyon at speed.

According to a marble tablet at the Jiang Ancestral Temple, on Yu’er Road in Dali (used today as a folk craft museum), Jiang Zonghan died of an illness in 1903, aged about 65. The imperial court donated 250 silver taels towards the funeral expenses, a further 350 taels to have a memorial stele carved and awarded his son the rank of a sixth-level official.
The former headquarters of Jiang’s company, Fuchunheng, survive as a traditional white-walled complex in Kunming’s recently gentrified old city.
Now serving as the Silver Chest Boutique Hotel, it was built in the early 20th century in a fusion of styles. European decorative tiles and stained-glass windows feature alongside Chinese beam carvings and a layout of wooden galleried courtyards. A sign reading “Fuchunheng” is mounted above the original office entrance. Stencilled in red across these architectural features, faded Cultural Revolution slogans from the 1960s – such as “Destroy the Old, Establish the New” – would, ironically, have protected this venerable building from vandalism during those chaotic times, when damaging Mao Zedong’s written words was akin to blasphemy.
Fuchunheng survived until 1937, the year Japan invaded China. According to Yang, disputes among the directors had already undermined the company’s finances, perhaps fuelled by wartime hyperinflation; the headquarters at Kunming were sold off and the business declared bankrupt.
Indirectly, Jiang has left an even more consequential piece of history in his wake. As a result of Margary’s murder – whether Jiang was involved in it or not – China was obliged to send a diplomatic mission of apology to Britain in 1877.
The group lodged at Portland Place in central London, where they established China’s first permanent overseas embassy, which remains in the same location today.


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The words “Jinlong Bridge” are carved onto a board bearing a picture of Jiang Zonghan on the bridge. Photo: David Leffman

A sign reading Fuchunheng is mounted over the entrance of its former offices in Kunming. Photo: David Leffman

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After escaping serfdom, Jiang Zonghan became a decorated general, and then a businessman, before taking the fall for killing a British explorer – but why did he build this mysterious bridge?


Slave, soldier, tycoon … the true story of Jiang Zonghan, the Chinese general who took the fall for killing a British explorer, before building a mysterious bridge over Eurasia’s longest river
