Main routes
Jinniu, Micang, Lizhi, Chencang, Baoxie, Tangluo, Ziwu
The Shu Roads are the cluster of ancient ways ...
The Shu Roads are the cluster of ancient ways through the Qinling and Daba mountains joining Guanzhong with Sichuan: the Jinniu, Micang and Lizhi roads over the Daba range; the Chencang, Baoxie, Tangluo and Ziwu roads over the Qinling — 'harder than climbing to the blue sky,' as Li Bai sang of their peril. They carried Qin's conquest of Shu and the unification wars of every age, forming the precipitous corridor between the Yellow River and Yangtze civilizations, and running south to join the Southern Silk Road and the southwest networks. Plank-road sockets, Jianmen Pass and the ancient cypresses of Cuiyun Corridor survive; the routes have been listed for World Heritage tentative nomination since 2016 as a candidate 'eighth wonder of the world.'
The Qinling and Daba run a thousand li; the ancients carved plank roads into the sheer cliffs — sockets chiseled into the rock, beams inserted, boards laid: a suspended wooden bridge on a cliff face. The ranks of sockets still stud the walls of Mingyue Gorge above the Jialing River — without explosive or steel, fire-and-water quenching split the rock; every socket was a battle with the cliff.
Li Bai's line 'the earth collapsed and strong men died, before the ladder-to-heaven and stone planks could link' is not pure hyperbole: the legend of the Jinniu road tells of Qin kings bamboozling the King of Shu into opening the way with a 'gold-dunging stone ox,' and of the five strongmen crushed by the collapsing mountain — the price of road-building, kept as a tragic fable in folk memory.
'Hold Shu and you hold Chu; hold Chu and you hold all under heaven' — in 316 BC Qin took Shu by the Jinniu road, gained the granaries of the Ba-Shu, and the six states lost their last chance; Liu Bang's feint at Chencang and the Chu–Han contest turned on these roads; Zhuge Liang's six marches from the mountains and Jiang Wei's stand at Jianmen fill the Three Kingdoms records.
Jianmen Pass was the lock of the system: 'one man holds the pass, ten thousand cannot break it' — in a hundred battles over two thousand years, the pass was broken from the front almost never. The Shu roads were more than roads: they were the strategic geography of the cold-steel age — to read them is to understand why Sichuan was said to stir before the empire and settle after it.
The roads were trade and post roads too: tea, Shu brocade and well-salt went north; silk and horses came south; the lychees for Tang Xuanzong's consort ran the Lizhi road to Chang'an in three days — 'one rider, red dust, the consort smiles' was an express line to rival today's cold chain. Post stations followed one another, and along the ancient road at Jianzhou the Cuiyun Corridor still keeps over ten thousand thousand-year cypresses — the largest man-planted ancient cypress grove on earth.
Southward the roads met the Southern Silk Road and the tea-horse networks; northward they fed the Guanzhong–Hexi system: not an isolated mountain path but a hub of ancient China's southwest within the Eurasian web. Today's Xi'an–Chengdu high-speed line crosses the Qinling through twenty-odd tunnels in three hours — 'harder than climbing the sky' is history now, and the old cypresses of Cuiyun stand where they stood, watching the traffic roll.