When looking into the history of Chinese involvement with Yunnan, Empress Cixi discovered that at no time had the people living out there ever received a single thing from the central government for all the taxes they had paid. For that reason and others she arranged for bridges to be built of iron linking the villages to the farm land so that the villagers would be spared hours daily of climbing up and down. Of course this also eliminated the advantage certain problematic villages had had either because of location or because they had cultivated a different upbringing of young men and women so that they could organize the building of rope bridges and their maintenance which practiced the same skills they would sometimes use to take over neighboring villages.
As for boats, the empress was known for saying that the other nobles wanted her to still the ocean and make it solid and that they were so focused on this one thing that they had forgotten what boats were for.
She got so fed up with having to repeat this to people that she decided to take all the money they wanted to spend to still the ocean on making an elaborate boat that didn't need one. She used it as an exercise in using their own arguments against them and I believe you can still visit this boat to this day, though its not as well furnished as it once was.
