The highest bridge in the world, built in China, opens to circulation. The structure reaches a height of 625 meters
The bridge of the Grand Canyon Huajiang, from the province of Guizhou, southwest of China, will be open to circulation on Sunday, September 28th. The Chinese state press described as the highest bridge in the world.
The Bridge of the Great Canyon Huajiang/PHOTO: Video capture
According to, South China Morning Post, the suspended bridge, which was built in three years, crosses the great Huajiang canyon and is intended to reduce the time crossing time from two hours to only a few minutes, the Xinhua State Agency reported.
In Guizhou there are already almost half of the 100 highest bridges in the world, and the new project amounts to 625 m above the river, up to the bridge table.
It is about the same height with Chinese scratch Shanghai Tower, and about 60 m more than the former record holder, the Duge Bridge, about 200 km away.
Crossing the great Huajiang canyon – known as the “crack of the earth” due to the incredibly deep and narrow gorge – the bridge is also about to become the longest mountain bridge in the world, with a total length of 2,890 m.
The main opening is 1,420 m-10 m longer than Humber Bridge in the UK, which was the longest-suspended bridge in the world until 1998, according to the Highestbridge.com website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejdmvr1t-ww
The main bridge is assembled from 93 sections of steel beams, weighing about 22,000 tons, three times the weight of the Eiffel tower, according to the China's Science and Technology Daily.
The bridge crosses the Beipan river, already crossed by two of the highest bridges in the world. In addition to the Duge Bridge, located on the border with the Yunnan province, opened in 2016 and described by the BBC as “an impossible engineering achievement”, there is also the Beipanjiang Guanxing Bridge of 366 m, built in 2003.
Zhang Yin, the director of the Guizhou Province's transport department, said in a press conference on Wednesday that, for the construction of the bridge, the engineers had to overcome challenges such as the strong wind winds and the complex geological conditions.
He added that the project obtained 21 authorized patents and that some of the technical advances – including in areas such as wind -resistant design and construction at high altitudes – were included in national standards for future projects.
According to highestbridge.com, Guizhou is on the road to have over 1,000 bridges with a height of over 100 m by 2030. Of the 50 highest bridges in the world – with heights over 300 m – only three are outside China.
