Chinese Bridges. Ronald G. Knapp

on the heralded caotang or thatched cottage of Du Fu, a Tang-dynasty poet. It is said that Du Fu chose this location near Huanhua Xi (Washing Flowers Creek) because of its simple beauty. With dense vegetation, including groves of bamboo, the naturalistic garden differs significantly from better known gardens in the Jiangnan region. Paths lead to as well as help define distinctive areas of the garden. Although none of the bridges is ancient, each, as these images show, is a relatively simply composition of stone, wood, and bamboo laid simply as planks or aligned in a zigzag shape.

      Historical and Modern Bridges

      Over the past two decades, some of the world’s most daring and beautiful bridges have been built in China, achievements essentially unknown in the West. While new bridges in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and a few other large cities are well known, countless other fine bridges have been completed as components of the country’s explosive development of its overall transportation infrastructure. These include innovative engineering approaches that have challenged the structural status quo, including girder bridges that receive some support from cables and even some “next generation” structures that seemingly defy accepted engineering principles and basic physics. Not surprisingly, as elsewhere in the world, the international media reports on failures, such as the Fenghuang Bridge in Hunan, whose collapse in 2007 was attributed to contractors cutting corners, but rarely highlights the extraordinary medium-scale and smaller modern bridges being built throughout the country.

      Old China hands remember well the national pride accompanying the completion, in December 1968, of the Yangzi River Bridge at Nanjing, a majestic double-decker, double-track highway and railway bridge, which Western engineers had claimed would be impossible to build at the site. Today, there are more than fifty bridges spanning the Yangzi, with another sixty planned to be added by 2020, each one deemed necessary in order to nurture interregional trade. The Chinese press heralds the completion of each new bridge in terms of originality and importance, many of which are world class. Shanghai’s Lupu Bridge over the Huangpu River, opened in 2003, which has a main span of 550 meters, is the world’s longest arch bridge. In eastern Zhejiang province, the Xihoumen Bridge, now the second longest suspension bridge in the world, was completed in December 2007, overtaking the Runyang Bridge linking Yangzhou and Zhenjiang in 2003, which at the time was China’s longest suspension bridge. In the summer of 2007, the Hangzhou Bay Bridge became the longest transoceanic bridge in the world, although it does not have the longest cable-stayed main span; it is expected to be open to traffic in 2008. A feasibility study has been carried out to build an even longer cross-sea suspension bridge across the Qiongzhou Straits between Guangdong and Hainan provinces. The completion of new structures in provinces and counties is always a time to savor— and boast about—the technical, economic, and aesthetic significance of bridge building.

      Spurred by the need to rebuild and refashion China’s large, medium, and small towns and cities, planners and architects have brought about a transformation of urban landscapes, including not only the development of transportation infrastructure but also the expansion of green spaces, including parks as well as tree-lined roads, canals, and streams. Such developments, unfortunately, have brought in their wake the well-documented and tragic destruction of cultural landscapes, including the demolition of countless old houses, neighborhoods, temples, and bridges, all in the name of progress. As is well known, moreover, environmental degradation has fouled the air and water over much of China at a scale that is intolerable, increasing dangers to the health and quality of life of hundreds of millions of people. At the same time, even in a city as polluted as Beijing, the investment in green spaces has led to the restoration of cultural heritage as well as the creation of ersatz historical landscapes.

      While this structure appears like an open spandrel bridge, it is in fact a fanciful and imposing arched entry to a new development in Chengdu, Sichuan.

      Located in an expanded western garden of the Yihe Yuan or Summer Palace in Beijing, this new bridge mimics the form of the original Zhaozhou Bridge.

      The Anshun (Peaceful and Favorable) Bridge, completed in 2003 to replace a bridge lost in a flood in the 1980s, straddles the Jinjiang River and provides space for a restaurant in the revitalized downtown area of Chengdu, Sichuan.