Isu Razi Pass | |
---|---|
Pumtang L'ka | |
Location | Gongshan county, Yunnan, China - Putao District, Kachin, Myanmar |
Range | Gaoligong Mountains, Hengduan Mountains |
Coordinates | 27°40′08″N98°26′41″E / 27.6689°N 98.4447°E |
Isu Razi Pass is a border pass between China's Yunnan province and Myanmar, close to the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region. [1] To the north of the pass is the Gongshan Derung and Nu Autonomous County of China. To the south is the Putao District of the Kachin State of Myanmar.
The Isu Razi Pass is described as lying on the Irrawaddy–Salween water-parting line. [2]
In the Gongshan county to the north of the pass, the Dulong River (also called Taron or Derung river) flows down from the north, and makes a sharp bend to the west, [2] [3] joining Myanmar's N'Mai Hka River, which is part of the Irrawaddy River basin. [4]
To the southwest of the pass, other tributaries of the N'Mai Hka river flow south. The Salween River basin is to the east of the pass.
Around Isu Razi Pass, it is very sparsely populated, with 3 inhabitants per square kilometer. [5] In the surrounding countryside, mainly mixed forest grows. [6]
During 1913–1914, the representatives of Tibet, China and Britain met at Simla to negotiate the relations between Tibet and China. In the course of the negotiations, the borders of Tibet against China as well as British Raj were defined. Isu Razi pass was defined as the trijunction of the three jurisdictions. [7] To the north of the pass was to be 'Inner Tibet', the portion of eastern Tibet that was under the control of China. (It had been so since 1720s.) To the east was to be China proper and to the south and west was the Burmese territory of the British Raj. The Chinese representative however maintained that the Inner Tibet area was already part of China. [8] Since China never ratified the Simla Convention, the Chinese position still persists. The Gongshan Derung and Nu Autonomous County to the north of the Isu Razi pass is part of China's Yunnan province.
The border between Tibet and the British Raj, later called the McMahon Line, was drawn on a more detailed map and negotiated between the representatives of Britain and Tibet. This line ended at the Isu Razi Pass. The border, agreed via an exchange of notes on 24–25 March 1914, was later incorporated in the Simla Convention maps.
After Myanmar (then called Burma) became independent and China took control of Tibet, the two countries had occasional border clashes, and started engaging in border talks in 1955. The talks gained momentum in January 1960, when the prime minister Ne Win was invited to Peking and an agreement was reached within five days. China agreed to use the watershed as the "customary boundary" between the Isu Razi Pass and the Diphu Pass at the trijunction with India. According to scholar Taylor Fravel, this involved China conceding to Myanmar 1,000 square kilometres of territory. [9]
The Salween is a Southeast Asian river, about 3,289 kilometres (2,044 mi) long, flowing from the Tibetan Plateau south into the Andaman Sea. The Salween flows primarily within southwest China and eastern Myanmar (Burma), with a short section forming the border of Burma and Thailand. Throughout most of its course, it runs swiftly through rugged mountain canyons. Despite the river's great length, only the last 90 km (56 mi) are navigable, where it forms a modest estuary and delta at Mawlamyine. The river is known by various names along its course, including Thanlwin in Burma and Nu Jiang in China. The commonly used spelling "Salween" is an anglicisation of the Burmese name dating from 19th-century British maps.
The Derung people are an ethnic group. They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by China. Their population of 6,000 is found in the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan in the Derung Valley of Gongshan Derung and Nu Autonomous County. Another 600 can be found east of the Derung Valley, living in the mountains above the Nu River near the village of Binzhongluo in northern Gongshan Derung and Nu Autonomous County.
The McMahon Line is the boundary between Tibet and British India as agreed in the maps and notes exchanged by the respective plenipotentiaries on 24–25 March 1914 at Delhi, as part of the 1914 Simla Convention. The line delimited the respective spheres of influence of the two countries in the eastern Himalayan region along northeast India and northern Burma (Myanmar), which were earlier undefined. The Republic of China was not a party to the McMahon Line agreement, but the line was part of the overall boundary of Tibet defined in the Simla Convention, initialled by all three parties and later repudiated by the government of China. The Indian part of the Line currently serves as the de facto boundary between China and India, although its legal status is disputed by the People's Republic of China. The Burmese part of the Line was renegotiated by the People's Republic of China and Myanmar.
The Nu people are one of the 56 ethnic groups recognized by the People's Republic of China. Their population of 27,000 is divided into the Northern, Central and Southern groups. Their homeland is a country of high mountains and deep ravines crossed by the Dulong, Irrawaddy, and Nujiang rivers. The name "Nu" comes from the fact that they were living near the Nujiang river, and the name of their ethnic group derives from there.
The Irrawaddy River is a river that flows from north to south through Myanmar (Burma). It is the country's largest river and most important commercial waterway. Originating from the confluence of the N'mai and Mali rivers, it flows relatively straight North-South before emptying through the Irrawaddy Delta in the Ayeyarwady Region into the Andaman Sea. Its drainage basin of about 404,200 square kilometres (156,100 sq mi) covers a large part of Burma. After Rudyard Kipling's poem, it is sometimes referred to as 'The Road to Mandalay'.
Walong is an administrative town and the headquarters of eponymous circle in the Anjaw district in eastern-most part of Arunachal Pradesh state in India. It also has a small cantonment of the Indian Army. Walong is on banks of Lohit River, which enters India 35 km north of Walong at India-China LAC at Kaho pass.
Dulong or Drung, Derung, Rawang, or Trung, is a Sino-Tibetan language in China. Dulong is closely related to the Rawang language of Myanmar (Burma). Although almost all ethnic Derung people speak the language to some degree, most are multilingual, also speaking Burmese, Lisu, and Mandarin Chinese except for a few very elderly people.
Zayul County (Tibetan: རྫ་ཡུལ་རྫོང) or Zayü is a county in the Nyingchi Prefecture in the southeastern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China.
The Sino-Indian border dispute is an ongoing territorial dispute over the sovereignty of two relatively large, and several smaller, separated pieces of territory between China and India. The first of the territories, Aksai Chin, is administered by China as part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Tibet Autonomous Region and claimed by India as part of the union territory of Ladakh; it is mostly uninhabited high-altitude wasteland in the larger regions of Kashmir and Tibet and is crossed by the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway, but with some significant pasture lands at the margins. The other disputed territory is south of the McMahon Line, in the area formerly known as the North-East Frontier Agency and now called Arunachal Pradesh which is administered by India. The McMahon Line was part of the 1914 Simla Convention signed between British India and Tibet, without China's agreement. China disowns the agreement, stating that Tibet was never independent when it signed the Simla Convention.
Yatung or Yadong, also known as Shasima , is the principal town in the Chumbi Valley or Yadong County in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It is also its administrative headquarters.
The Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Yunnan province, China. It lies within the drainage basins of the upper reaches of the Jinsha (Yangtze), Lancang (Mekong) and Nujiang (Salween) rivers, in the Yunnan section of the Hengduan Mountains.
Gongshan Derung and Nu Autonomous County is an autonomous county located in Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture, in the northwest of Yunnan province, China. It has an area of 4,506 km2 (1,740 sq mi) and a population of about 37,894 according to the 2010 Census. The county government is stationed in Cikai Town
The Simla Convention, officially the Convention Between Great Britain, China, and Tibet, was an ambiguous treaty concerning the status of Tibet negotiated by representatives of the Republic of China, Tibet and Great Britain in Simla in 1913 and 1914.
The Taping River, known as Ta Hkaw Hka in Kachin and Daying River in Chinese, is a river in Yunnan province, China and northern Myanmar (Burma). It is the first tributary of the country's chief river, the Irrawaddy, and the watersheds between it and the N'mai Hka river to the northwest and the rivers Shweli and Salween to the southeast form part of the boundary between China and Myanmar. Its source lies in Yingjiang County of Yunnan, and it enters the Irrawaddy near Bhamo, Kachin State.
The Gaoligong Mountains are a mountainous sub-range of the southern Hengduan Mountain Range, located in the western Yunnan highlands and straddling the border of southwestern China and northern Myanmar (Burma).
The N'Mai River or N'Mai Hka is a river in northern Myanmar (Burma).
There are almost 200 large dams in Myanmar. Myanmar (Burma) has a large hydroelectric power potential of 39,000 megawatts (52,000,000 hp), although the economical exploitable potential is about 37,000 megawatts (50,000,000 hp). Between 1990 and 2002, the country tripled its installed capacity of hydro plants, increasing from 253 megawatts (339,000 hp) to 745 megawatts (999,000 hp). Total installed capacity in 2010 is at least 2,449 megawatts (3,284,000 hp) MW, 6% of potential. Several large dams are planned to increase future hydro utilization.
Milakatong La or Menlakathong La is a historic mountain pass along the trade route between Tawang in India's Arunachal Pradesh and Tsona Dzong in Tibet's Shannan province via the valley of Tsona Chu.
Migyitun, also called Tsari or Zhari, is a town in the Lhöntse County of Tibet's Shannan Prefecture. It is on the banks of the Tsari Chu river close to the McMahon Line, the de facto border with India's Arunachal Pradesh. It is also a key part of the Buddhist Tsari pilgrimage, made once in twelve years, that makes a wide circumambulation of the Dakpa Sheri mountain.
Tulung La (Tibetan: ཐུ་ལུང་ལ་, Wylie: thu lung la) is a border pass between the Tsona County in the Tibet region of China and India's Tawang district in Arunachal Pradesh. It is in the eastern part of the two districts, close to the Gori Chen cluster of mountains, on a watershed between the Tsona Chu river in Tibet and the Tawang Chu in the Tawang district. The watershed ridge forms the border between Tibet and India as per the McMahon Line. Tulung La provided an invasion route to China during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. It is also the scene of occasional clashes between the two sides.