Superlative China is Building the Highest Bridge in the World

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Golden Gate Bridge and Sydney Harbour Bridge—you've had your time: On June 30, a new architectural marvel among bridges will be completed, the "Bridge over the Huajiang Gorge" in China's Guizhou province.

It will be the new "highest bridge in the world": It stretches 2,050 feet above the Beipan River flowing beneath it, spanning a massive canyon that locals reverently call "the Earth crack." It will be 660 feet higher than the Eiffel Tower. For comparison: The Golden Gate Bridge has a height of 220 feet above the water level (measured at high tide).

The Chinese bridge will also be higher than the current record holder as the "highest bridge in the world," the Duge Bridge on the border of Guizhou and Yunnan provinces (1,850 feet), which, upon its opening in 2016, surpassed the previous record holder in France, the Millau Viaduct, with its structural height of 1,125 feet.

Steel Truss Suspension Bridge With Almost 1.9 miles in Length

The new "Huajiang Canyon Bridge" is a steel truss suspension bridge with a total length of 9,480 feet. What impresses bridge engineers even more is its main span, the longest free section between the two central pillars, measuring 4,660 feet. While this does not earn the bridge over the Huajiang Gorge another world record, it still holds the distinction of having the longest main span of any suspension bridge built in a mountainous region worldwide.

During the construction of this bridge in about three and a half years, the team of the "Guizhou Bridge Construction Group" had to deal with a number of challenges, including winds that sometimes sweep through this huge gorge with hurricane force of 12 on the Beaufort scale.

Engineers Develop Windproof Welding Method

To produce reliable welds with high precision in the millimeter range even at such wind speeds, the engineers invented a new, windproof welding method. China's own Beidou satellite navigation system was also used to position the steel girders, weighing up to 237 US tons, with special cranes to millimeter accuracy.

Massive Expansion of Remote Mountain Regions

The bridge, as impressive as it may be, is just one of many record-breaking new bridges currently under construction in China. The central government in Beijing is investing heavily in infrastructure in remote mountainous regions of the country to extend the economic growth of the People's Republic, which has so far been concentrated mainly in the eastern coastal areas, more strongly to the western provinces of the country, often inhabited by national minorities and traversed by mountain ranges and river valleys.

Another example of this kind is the "Tianhe-Longtan Bridge" in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, which, upon its opening last year, became the world's longest arch bridge with a main span of 1,970 feet.

By 2030, according to a recent study in the Chinese journal "Journal of Transport Science and Engineering," "the longest suspension bridges, the highest crossings, and all record-breaking cable-stayed megastructures on Earth will bear the signature of Chinese construction engineers."

China is building such record-breaking bridges in such large numbers that it is no longer easy to list them all, not even just the new world record holders.

China's new bridge marvels span across entire typhoon-swept straits on the coast, bridge fog-shrouded gorges in once remote stretches of the Himalayas, or cross vast rivers like the Yangtze, seemingly defying both geography and gravity while breaking one construction record after another.

Homage to Famous Predecessor

China, which about a generation ago relied on foreign know-how for bridge construction, has "transformed into the undisputed architect of the world's boldest bridge designs" in a short time, comments the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong on the upcoming opening of the world's new highest bridge.

In designing the bridge over the Huajiang Gorge, China's designers still politely pay homage to the famous Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco by using Art Deco elements to recall the famous predecessor, which, upon its opening in 1937, defined the pinnacle of global engineering in suspension bridges.

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Henrik Bork, a long-time China correspondent for Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Rundschau, is Managing Director at Asia Waypoint, a consulting agency specializing in China, based in Beijing.