Yunnan has been inhabited for a very long time, with evidence reaching back through galleries of Stone-Age rock art to two 1.5-million-year-old teeth found near the northern town of Yuanmou. Records of civilization, however, are far more recent. According to the Han historian Sima Qian, the Chinese warrior prince Zhuang Qiao founded the pastoral Dian Kingdom in eastern Yunnan during the third century BC, though it's probable that he simply became chief of an existing nation. The Dian were a slave society, who vividly recorded their daily life and ceremonies involving human sacrifice in sometimes gruesome bronze models unearthed from contemporary tombs. The kingdom was acknowleged by China in 109 BC, its ruler receiving military aid and a golden seal from the emperor Wu , who hoped to control the Southern Silk Road through to India. But the collapse of the Han empire in 204 AD was followed by the dissolution of Dian into private statelets which were absorbed during the eighth century by the emerging Nanzhao Kingdom , based around Dali.

Politically and culturally, the Nanzhao and its successors managed to dominate large parts of Southeast Asia before succumbing in the thirteenth century to the armies of Kublai Khan . Directly controlled by China for the first time, for a while Yunnan served as a remote dustbin for political troublemakers, thereby escaping the population explosions, wars and migrations that plagued central China. But the Mongol invasion had also introduced a large Muslim population to the province, who, angered by their deteriorating status under the Chinese, staged a rebellion in 1856, storming Kunming and briefly managing to establish an independent state at Dali. Millions died in the rebellion's suppression, and a wasted Yunnan was left to local bandits and private armies for the following half-century.

Strangely, it was the Japanese invasion during the 1930s that sparked a resurgence of the province's fortunes. Blockaded into southwestern China, the Guomindang government initiated great programmes of rail and road building through the region, though they never really controlled Yunnan. Moreover, their poor treatment of minority groups made the Red Army's cause all the more attractive when civil war resumed in 1945. Liberation came smoothly, but the Communists ' good intentions of coexistence with minorities, better hospitals, schools and communications were badly stalled during the Cultural Revolution and then, in the 1980s, by the war with Vietnam, and it's only now that Yunnan is finally benefiting from its forced association with the rest of the country. Never agriculturally rich - only a tenth of the land is considered arable - the province looks to mineral resources, tourism and its potential as a future conduit between China and the much discussed, but as yet unformed, trading bloc of Vietnam , Laos , Thailand and Burma . Though political snags have slowed its formation, should these countries ever form an unrestricted economic alliance, the amount of trade passing through Yunnan would be immense - a resurrection of the old Silk Road - and highways, rail and air services have already been laid for the day the borders open freely.