World’s highest bridge opens to traffic in Guizhou, China

THE world’s highest bridge opened to traffic in China on Sept 28, state media said, capping an engineering feat three years in the making and snatching the record from another bridge in the same province.

The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge towers 625m above a river and vast gorge in the country’s rugged southern province of Guizhou, also home to the 565m Beipanjiang Bridge that is now the world’s second highest.

Live drone footage broadcast by state media on Sept 28 showed vehicles traversing the immense structure, its blue support towers partially engulfed in clouds.

Crowds of onlookers, including project engineers and local officials, gathered on the bridge for a ceremony to mark the occasion, several expressing their pride and excitement in live interviews to state media.

“The opening of the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge reduces travel time between the two sides from two hours to two minutes,” head of the provincial transport department Zhang Yin said on Sept 24.

Its opening makes “enormous improvements to regional transportation conditions and (injects) new impetus into regional economic and social development”, she added.

China has invested heavily in major infrastructure projects in recent decades, a period of rapid economic growth and urbanisation in the country.

The hilly province of Guizhou is criss-crossed by thousands of bridges. State news agency Xinhua said on Sept 24 that nearly half of the world’s 100 highest bridges are in the province.

The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge took more than three years to complete, Xinhua reported. Its 1,420m main span makes it the “world’s largest-span bridge built in a mountainous area”, it added.

Apart from the world’s highest bridge, the tallest – measured in terms of the height of its own structure, rather than the distance to the ground – remains France’s Millau viaduct at 343m.