Guizhou's five record-setting bridges

Editor's note: Guizhou province in Southwest China is a mountainous area, with 92.5 percent of its land covered by mountains and hills. The province has built nearly 30,000 bridges since the late 1970s. These eye-catching bridges facilitated transportation, bringing greater benefits to local residents.

Beipanjiang Bridge: World's highest bridge

Located on the boundary of Southwest China's Guizhou province and Yunnan province, Beipanjiang Bridge sits over 565.4 meters above the Beipanjiang Grand Valley and has a largest span of 720 meters, making it the world's highest bridge and the second-longest steel girder cable-stayed bridge.

With a total length of 1,341.4 meters, the four-lane bridge was opened to traffic in December 2016, as a part of an expressway linking Hangzhou city in East China's Zhejiang province and Ruili city in Guizhou's neighboring Yunnan province. It has shortened the travel time between Liupanshui city in Guizhou province and Xuanwei city in Yunnan province from over 4 hours to within 1 hour.

In 2018, the bridge won the Gustav Lindenthal Medal, considered the Nobel Prize in the international bridge industry. In 2019, it received the Award of Special Merit of the International Federation of Consulting Engineers, another prestigious international bridge award.