Stone Cattle Road

The story goes that King Huiwen of Qin on the Wei River wished to conquer the kingdom of Shu to the south over the impassable Qinling Mountains in the Sichuan Basin.

The king of Qin replied that he was glad to do so, but the cattle were delicate and that to deliver them it would first be necessary to build a gallery road over the mountains.

If the Qin invasion of 316BC was a sudden decision provoked by the Marquis of Zu's quarrel with the King of Shu then the road, or part of it, must have been in place before this.

Sage remarks that "determining the Qinling portion of the route was once one of those perennial quibbles like the attempts to find Hannibal's path through the Alps."

Sage thinks that the Stone Cattle Road proper was the segment south of the Daba Mountains, although the term was used loosely for the whole route.