I’d like to learn more about places like Yunnan and Guizhou in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I’d be interested in any book recommendations on the region’s history, especially the ethnic minorities in that area and Yunnan’s contacts with Southeast Asia. I’d also be interested in any books about the KMT troops from Yunnan who fled to Burma after the Chinese Civil War.
I will be unable to help for the twentieth century, but for the nineteenth, there is a very good book by David Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate (2005), that covers the 'Panthay' Rebellion that took place in Yunnan from 1856 to 1873, which was a major watershed in Yunnanese affairs, though that is admittedly a somewhat narrow focus. A broader discussion of Yunnan can be found in the form of Charles Giersch's Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier (2006), which more or less covers the entire period of Qing rule in Yunnan from 1662 to 1912, with a focus on issues of ethnic relations and political organisation.