History
It is the reputed route of the 13th century invasion of Assam in India by the Ahoms, a Shan tribe. Prospected by the British in the late 19th Century as a possible railway route from India to Myitkyina in north Burma through the Hukawng Valley, the pass became famous during World War II for being the initial obstacle encountered by American General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's forces in their effort to build a land route to isolated China after the fall of Burma to the Japanese.
The Ledo Road began at Ledo, the railhead, and passed through Lekhapani, Jagun, Jairampur (the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh boundary and beginning of Inner Line), and Nampong before switchbacking steeply upwards through densely forested hills to the pass, 12 km away. The distance from Ledo to Pangsau Pass is 61 km (38 mi). Because of the fierce gradients and the mud which made getting up to the pass difficult, it was nicknamed "Hell Pass" during the war.
The Pangsau Pass Winter Festival is a global village event organized every year in Nampong, Arunachal Pradesh.
Read more about this topic: Pangsau Pass
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)