Why it looks like this

The 'Spring City' owes its mild climate to altitude: nearly 1,900 metres up, beside the broad Dianchi Lake, ringed by hills. The old city grew between lake and mountains, and the modern one spread along the lakeshore plains.

Geography made it a wartime lifeline: when Japan blockaded China's coast, the Burma Road — finished in 1938 by hundreds of thousands of labourers — ended at Kunming, and the city swelled with refugees, universities and airfields. It has been the crossroads to Southeast Asia ever since.