Duge Bridge

FACTSFact sheet

01A gorge on the border

Southwest China is karst: limestone dissolved by water over millions of years, with sheer walls, caves and rivers sunk at the bottom of canyons. In Guizhou, a road that wanted to run straight would have to leap from one wall to the other. The G56, which links Hangzhou, in the east, to Ruili, on the border with Myanmar, reached the Yunnan border there, facing a gorge with walls up to 500 meters high.

The bridge would be the controlling work of the Bijie–Duge section, the one that sets the schedule for everything else. The site stood at about 1,500 meters of altitude, in a region where frost, fog, storms and snow are frequent, according to the Economic Daily. Before settling on the location, a team spent almost two years measuring the wind, the People's Daily reports, and the Guizhou government records a measuring tower, a weather station and wind tunnel tests. The geological survey took half a year, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Guizhou and Yunnan split the bill. According to records from the time gathered in the Chinese encyclopedia, Yunnan went as far as pushing for the name Nizhu River Bridge, after the watercourse it crosses, while Guizhou kept First Beipan Bridge.

02The suspension bridge that stayed on paper

To cross 720 meters in one go, there were two ways. A suspension bridge hangs the deck from two main cables that pass over the towers and end anchored in anchorage blocks, concrete masses dug into the ground on each bank. A cable-stayed bridge does without those blocks: each cable, the stay, runs from the tower straight to the girder, and the forces close within the structure itself.

The design team considered the suspension option, the Economic Daily reports, and dropped it. The large excavation for the anchorage would affect the stability and safety of the slopes, on a bank of 500-meter walls. And the bedrock was soluble carbonate, cut by solution fissures: it would be hard to find a spot where the anchorage could rely on the rock. For spans of 500 to 800 meters in mountains, they concluded, the cable-stayed design with a steel truss also came out cheaper.

That is why the picture that circulates, of cables plunging tens of meters into the rock, describes precisely the bridge that was not built. On the Duge Bridge, the 112 pairs of stay cables run from two concrete towers, one of 269 meters on the Guizhou side and another of about 247 meters on the Yunnan side, and end attached to the truss. None of them touches the ground.

03Digging by hand above caves

What really went tens of meters down into the rock were the foundations. According to the People's Daily, the bridge has 264 piles, and the drilling rig could not work in the karst: the caves were so many and so unpredictable that the only way was to dig by hand. Almost all the piles went through caves. The worst case was hitting seepage with running sand, and then grout had to be injected to consolidate the ground while digging. The piles were 40 meters long, according to the Guizhou government.

Before that there was the mountain to climb. The site opened about 23 kilometers of access roads and a power line of almost a hundred poles, in a job that took more than three months. A transformer weighing more than a tonne was carried up the hill by 32 workers, over almost a month, according to the Economic Daily. The site's deputy manager, Yu Wenhao, wore out three pairs of shoes walking up and down while the access roads were being opened, the People's Daily reports.

The towers were raised with high-performance self-compacting concrete, pumped up to a height of 269 meters. Above 230 meters, the concrete mix had to be adjusted almost every 20 meters of climb, the People's Daily reports.

04Two arms over the void

With no way to rest anything on the bottom of the gorge, the girder could only grow from the edges. The side sections, over solid ground, were pushed into position, a method the Guizhou government describes as applied for the first time on a cable-stayed bridge. The main span grew as a cantilever from the two towers, segment by segment, each one hung from its pair of stay cables before the next one moved forward.

To erect these segments, CCCC Second Harbor Engineering used a method in which each piece was carried along the already finished girder and lifted at the tip. Each standard segment took four days, half the cycle with a conventional deck crane, and the project gained three months, according to the Guizhou government and the profile of chief engineer Liao Wanhui, then 30 years old. Photos from July 2016 show the two red truss arms advancing toward each other over the canyon, still apart.

They met on September 10, 2016. The precision required at the expansion joint gives a measure of the care involved: the difference in height between the central girders and the edge girders had to stay within half a millimeter, either way, or a quarter of the thickness of a coin, in the words of the Economic Daily. The bridge opened to traffic on December 29, 2016.

05What was not recorded

The project's accounts do not add up to a single number. The Chinese press speaks of about 1.03 billion yuan of total investment, and another record gives 778.86 million. No source consulted explains the difference, which may be that of the whole project versus that of the bridge alone. Without a reliable nominal figure, there is no way to bring it into today's money.

There is also no total for the workers. The only figure published is that of more than a thousand engineers and technicians, according to Jiemian, which does not count the laborers. And there is no record of deaths or injuries on the project in any source consulted, whether official or disputed, nor the opposite claim that there were no accidents. For a project from 2016, the silence says more about what gets published than about what happened.

06Nine years of a record

At the opening, the Chinese press announced that the bridge beat the 560 meters of the Sidu River Bridge, in Hubei. The comparison depends on where you measure from: the American researcher Eric Sakowski, who maintains the main catalog of high bridges, measures the Sidu at 496 meters to the water, and by that yardstick the Duge Bridge was the first crossing in the world to pass 500 meters. In 2018 came the Guinness certificate and the Gustav Lindenthal Medal, one of the main international bridge awards.

The record lasted nine years. On September 28, 2025, the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, also in Guizhou, opened with 625 meters from deck to water and a 1,420-meter span. It is a suspension bridge, precisely the type the Duge Bridge turned down. A year later, in September 2026, Xinhua counted more than 3 million visits to the tourist complex set up around the new record holder.

Guizhou has almost half of the hundred highest bridges in the world, according to the Xinhua news agency in 2025. The Duge Bridge, second on the list since 2025, still carries the G56 over the same gorge, and the village of Duge has become a lookout point, with guesthouses opened by residents; one of them told Xinhua that he used to need four hours to get to town.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  The bridge's cables plunge tens of meters into the rock.

  What the record shows

  The Duge Bridge is cable-stayed: its 112 pairs of stay cables end at the towers and the girder, none in the rock. Anchorage in rock belongs to suspension bridges, and the suspension design was dropped precisely because excavating the anchorage would threaten the stability of the fissured limestone walls, according to the Economic Daily. What went down into the rock were the 264 foundation piles, dug by hand.

• What people say

  The canyon is 565 meters deep.

  What the record shows

  The 565 meters run from the deck to the water. The top of the canyon walls lies below the deck, and the tops of the towers reach about 740 meters above the river.

• What people say

  It is the highest bridge in the world.

  What the record shows

  It was, from December 29, 2016 to September 28, 2025. Since then it has been the second, behind the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, at 625 meters, also in Guizhou.

• What people say

  It beat the previous record by only five meters.

  What the record shows

  The 560 meters attributed to the Sidu River Bridge, in China, come from the Chinese press. Measured to the water, the Sidu is 496 meters high, according to the HighestBridges catalog; other sources give 500 or 550 meters, without saying where they measure from.

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SOURCESSources

1. Guizhou Provincial Department of Transportation, "杭瑞高速贵州段北盘江大桥建成通车", 30/12/2016 — jt.guizhou.gov.cn
2. Guizhou Provincial Department of Transportation, interview on the bridge's construction technology, 09/10/2016 — jt.guizhou.gov.cn
3. Zhao Hao, "世界第一高桥'炼'成记", People's Daily, overseas edition, 01/12/2023 — paper.people.com.cn
4. Wu Bingze and Wang Xinwei, "世界第一高桥见证中国质量", Economic Daily, 08/05/2019 — finance.sina.cn
5. Xinhua, "北盘江大桥：让天堑变通途的'世界高度'", 23/09/2022 — news.cn
6. China Daily, "Beipanjiang set Guinness record as highest bridge", 20/09/2018 — global.chinadaily.com.cn
7. Guinness World Records, "Highest cable-stayed bridge" — guinnessworldrecords.com
8. Jiemian, "这架连接云贵两省的全球第一高桥", 2017 — jiemian.com
9. Sina, profile of chief engineer Liao Wanhui, 10/01/2017 — news.sina.cn
10. Daily Economic News, via 21jingji, on the investment and the joint project, 02/01/2017 — m.21jingji.com
11. Eric Sakowski, HighestBridges.com, "Beipanjiang Bridge Duge" — highestbridges.com
12. Xinhua, "World's tallest bridge opens to traffic in southwest China's Guizhou", 28/09/2025 — english.news.cn
13. Xinhua, "世界第一高桥通车一年 变身热门文旅打卡地", 28/09/2026 — news.cn
14. Wikimedia Commons, "Copyright rules by territory/China" (freedom of panorama) — commons.wikimedia.org

Images

• Fig. 01 — The Duge Bridge seen from a drone, with the river hundreds of meters below the deck: Glabb · CC BY-SA 3.0
• Fig. 02 — July 2016: the two arms of the main span advance as cantilevers from the towers, two months before meeting: Eric Sakowski (HighestBridges) · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 03 — From the valley slope, in July 2016: the river far below and the bridge still open high above: Eric Sakowski (HighestBridges) · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 04 — One of the towers and the fan-arranged stay cables attached to the truss girder, at the edge of the cliff: Glabb · CC BY-SA 3.0
• Fig. 05 — The bridge at sunset, in December 2018: ShakyIsles · CC BY-SA 4.0