Kunming Introduction

Kunming city is the provincial capital of Yunnan Province, which has an area of 15.6 thousand square kilometers and a population of 3.6 million. people : Predominately Han Chinese with considerable quantities of Dai, Bai, and other ethnic minorities .nming is the focal point of Yunnan minority culture. Some 26 ethnic minorities such as Yi, Bai, Miao, Dai, Hani and more inhabit the region. Each group has its own featured festivals such as the Torch festival of Yi people, the Golden Temple Fair and so on.

Kunming is situated at the high plateau of the eastern part of Yunnan Province. To the south is the biggest Dian Lake of Yunnan Province. Its proximity to other neighboring provinces such as Guizhou, Sichuan, and Tibet as well as its shared border with Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam make it one of the most popular holiday destinations in China. Kunming is also increasingly becoming a travel hub as the closest major city in China to both India and Thailand .

It belongs to the subtropical plateau monsoon climatic zone; the annual average temperature is 14.7°C and the yearly precipitation is 1024 mm. It is rich in phosphorus, salt mine and quartz and other such mineral resources as mirabilite, iron, bauxite, copper, coal, etc; it is also rich in ground water and geothermal energy resources.

Histroy
Historically the domain of Yunnan’s earliest inhabitants and first civilization, Kunming long profited from its position on the caravan roads through to South-East Asia, India and Tibet. Early townships in the southern edge of Lake Dianchi (outside the contemporary city perimeter) can be dated back to 279 BCE, although they have been long lost to history.

The Han Dynasty (205 BCE – 220 CE), seeking control over the Southern Silk Road running to Burma and India, brought much of Yunnan into China’s orbit, though subsequent dynasties could do little to tame what was then a remote and wild borderland.
In the 1300s, Kunming was retaken as the Ming Dynasty defeated the Mongols, which built a wall surrounding present-day Kunming. Ming General Wu Sangui defeated Manchu invaders 300 years later and held the city until his death in 1678, long after the rest of China had fallen under Manchu rule.

During the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, it was the seat of the superior prefecture of Yunnan.

In the 1800s, Kunming suffered at the hands of rebel leader Du Wenxiu, the Sultan of Dali, who attacked and besieged the city several times between 1858 and 1868.
Kunming reverted to county status in 1912, under the name Kunming, and became a municipality in 1935.Kunming was transformed into a modern city as a result of the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 when the invading Japanese forces caused a great number of east-coast Chinese refugees, some of whom were wealthy, to flood into the southwest of China. After 1949 Kunming developed rapidly into an industrial metropolis, second only to Chongqing in the southwest.