Six hours from Xiaguan along 120km of bumpy, hand-cobbled road (an expressway is under construction), BAOSHAN certainly has its share of history. The region was settled long before Emperor Wu's troops oversaw the paving of stretches of the Southern Silk Road nearby in 109 BC, and the famous third-century Sichuanese minister Zhuge Liang later reached Baoshan in one of his invasive "expeditions" across southwestern China. Kublai Khan fought a massive battle with the Burmese king Narathihapade outside the town in 1277, won by the khan after his archers managed to stampede Burmese elephants back through their own lines. Twenty years later the women and slaves of Marco Polo's "Vochan" (today's Baoshan) supported a tattooed, gold-toothed aristocracy - tooth-capping is still practised both here and in Xishuangbanna today. Baoshan was again in the front line in the 1940s, when a quarter of a million Chinese troops fought to keep the Japanese from invading through Burma, and remains garrisoned today, with young army recruits in poorly fitting green fatigues drilling around the parks and parade grounds.