GUIYANG, China, March 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — A news report from CNS: Nestled among the karst mountains of southwest China, a series of super bridges spanning deep gorges and reaching toward the clouds are transforming Guizhou’s geographical and development landscape. Once described as "a land with no three flat miles" due to its towering mountains, rugged valleys and fragmented terrain, Guizhou long suffered from transportation bottlenecks that hindered its development. In recent years, with the continuous advancement of transportation infrastructure construction in western China, Guizhou has achieved leaping development through bridge engineering. Today, the province has built more than 32,000 highway bridges, with its expressway mileage exceeding 9,000 kilometers, forming a modern comprehensive transportation network covering the entire province and realizing expressway access to every county and high-speed rail to every prefecture-level city.
The Huajiang Gorge Bridge. Photographed by Tang Zhe.
Dubbed the "Bridge Museum" by the outside world for its dense and spectacular cluster of bridges, Guizhou accounts for nearly half of the world’s top 100 highest bridges. Landmark bridges such as the Beipan River Bridge, Pingtang Grand Bridge and Baling River Bridge have successively won important international bridge awards, becoming representative projects showcasing China’s infrastructure construction capabilities. The Huajiang Gorge Bridge, opened to traffic in 2025, is another iconic project in Guizhou’s bridge map. Spanning the Huajiang Grand Canyon of the Beipan River, the bridge has a deck 625 meters above the water surface at the bottom of the gorge, making it the world’s highest bridge to date. Its main span stretches 1,420 meters, ranking first in the world among mountainous bridges. Since its opening, the travel time across the gorge, which once took about two hours, has been shortened to just two minutes, greatly improving regional transportation efficiency.
Beyond their transportation functions, Guizhou is exploring a development path of integrating bridge construction with tourism. Leveraging world-class bridges and gorge landscapes, the local government has built viewing platforms, high-altitude footpaths and extreme sports experience projects, turning bridges from "passageways for travel" into "scenic attractions". Spots like the Pingtang Grand Bridge, Baling River Bridge and Beipan River Bridge have become popular tourist check-in destinations, attracting visitors from home and abroad for sightseeing and experiences. As its expressway, high-speed rail and aviation networks continue to improve, Guizhou is gradually integrating into the construction of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor in western China, strengthening economic, trade and tourism ties with Southeast Asia and other regions. From "a land with no three flat miles" to a "high-speed plain", the numerous bridges crisscrossing the mountains have not only reshaped the transportation pattern but also stand as a vivid testament to how a mountainous province in China is promoting open development.
