China will soon reveal the world’s highest bridge, stretching two miles across a massive canyon and cutting travel time from one hour to just a minute.
The new Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge will open in June and comes with a price tag of £216,000,000.
The new build is impressive – towering more than 200 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower, and weighing three times more.
Chinese politician Zhang Shenglin said: ‘This super project spanning the “Earth’s crack” will showcase China’s engineering capabilities and boost Guizhou’s goal of becoming a world-class tourist destination.
‘Its steel trusses weigh about 22,000 metric tons — the equivalent of three Eiffel Towers — and were installed in just two months.’
Chief Engineer Li Zhao said: ‘Witnessing my work becomes something tangible — watching the bridge grow day by day and finally stand tall above the canyon — gives me a profound sense of achievement and pride.’
Other than providing vital transportation links in a more rural area of China, the new bridge will also be a major tourist attraction.
Plans for living areas, a glass walkway and the ‘highest bungee jump’ in the world have also been unveiled by planners.
The bridge is more impressive given it’s almost completely suspended above the major gorge below.
The region of China where this bridge is being built is home to almost half of the world’s 100 tallest bridges to help connect rural communities.
In 2016, China’s highest bridge was built in Beipanjiang, measuring in at an astounding 1,854 feet tall.
It is 1,341 metres long and cost £117 million to build – and also stretches across a precarious gorge.
It helped cut travel time for locals to just one hour, rather than four.
But the world’s tallest bridge – measured by the height of its own structure rather than the distance to the ground – is France’s Millau viaduct at 343 metres.
China also planned the world’s largest dam – which will generate an estimated 300,000,000,000 kWh of power per year.
The Chinese government plans to spend 1trillion yuan (£109billion) building the new massive dam over the Yarlung Tsangpo River, located in the Tibet autonomous region.
The current largest hydropower project in the world, the Three Gorges Dam which is also in China, supplies five million households with power every month. It was completed in 2008 and started supplying power to homes in 2012.
But when the Yarlung Tsangpo dam is up and running it’s hoped it will generate nearly 300billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of hydropower, which would meet the energy needs of 300million people every year.
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