Guizhou, a home to world-class bridges

Pingtang Bridge, located above the Caodu River Canyon, has the highest concrete bridge tower in the world. [Photo/ddcpc website]

Southwest China's Guizhou province is famous for its mountainous landscape, which made traffic congestion a problem. To change this situation, in 2016, the Guizhou government decided to build the Pingtang Bridge between Pingtang county and Luodian county, and effectively shortened the driving distance by half.

The bridge has a concrete bridge tower standing at 328 meters, which is the highest in the world. The construction of the bridge towers was challenging, as the intersecting surface of each bridge tower is as big as three basketball courts.

The karst landscape in the area made construction even more difficult, as few machines could be moved there. The only way to complete the construction was by using pure hand labor.

Ji Denggui, chief engineer of Pingtang Bridge project, said that the construction team arranged five people per shift and manually dug a 55-meter-deep caisson, which set a domestic record at that time.

To transport the concrete to the extremely high construction site, the construction team purchased special cranes, each worth $2.5 million, to lift the 63 metric tons of concrete to a height of 350 meters.

After overcoming various difficulties, the Pingtang Bridge was finally completed on September 26, 2019.

As more and more bridges have been constructed, Guizhou's remote villages connect with the bigger cities and find ways to alleviate their financial problems.