Home / Hidden China / The Guizhou Bridge Corridor
Two record-holding bridges, two prefectures, one drive. What is built, what is only planned, and where the official numbers disagree.
Hidden China · Published 11 September 2026 · Every claim below is source-linked at the end. We live in Guizhou and will keep this page current.
Who this is for: engineers, and anyone who would rather look at a 625-metre suspension span than another old town
Nobody sells a “bridge corridor”. Two record-holding structures stand at either end of a stretch of southern Guizhou, both have been fitted with visitor facilities, and both are genuinely worth the drive — but they sit on different expressways, in different prefectures, under different operators, and the corridor framing is ours, not a signposted route. More importantly: the official announcements tell you what has been built and what is planned, and that is all. Not one of the sources we could retrieve gives a ticket price, an opening time, a height or age limit, or a booking channel for a single attraction on the Huajiang bridge. So this is a route you assemble yourself, confirming each piece on the day.
The Zhenfeng end of that bridge is in our own prefecture and we still have not been on it. We have not ridden the lift, walked the glass floor or driven the two bridges in sequence. Everything below comes from the Guizhou Provincial Department of Transport, the Anshun and Qiannan government news services, People’s Daily and Xinhua, and we say which figure came from where.
The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge (花江峡谷大桥) opened on 28 September 2025, completing the Liuzhi–Anlong expressway. It crosses the Huajiang gorge — the “crack in the earth” (地球裂缝) — between Guanling county in Anshun and Zhenfeng county in Qianxinan, where we live. The main span is 1,420 m and the deck stands 625 m above the Beipan River. The provincial transport department states that the span is the longest of any mountain bridge in the world and the height the greatest of any bridge anywhere; construction began on 18 January 2022, so the whole thing took three years and eight months.
The statistic that matters to a driver is duller and better. Getting from the Guanling bank to the Zhenfeng bank used to mean a two-hour detour around the canyon. It is now two minutes.
A suspension bridge, and an unusually instrumented one. Each of the two main cables is made of 217 strands; a single strand weighs 43.4 tonnes and runs 2,378 m, and every one had to be placed in sequence more than 600 m above the river, with the first reference strand held to within 2 mm before the rest followed (People’s Daily, July 2024, when the cables were half spun). Wind was the governing problem: the team worked with Tongji University using Doppler laser radar to build a wind picture of the gorge from 2022 onward, then fitted adjustable steel wind wings. The lower stabiliser plate was designed to double as the high-altitude running track visitors are now offered — the aerodynamics and the attraction are the same piece of steel.
Three “smart cables” carrying fibre Bragg gratings monitor stress, temperature and humidity inside the main cable, and a dehumidifier cuts in automatically above 64 per cent humidity, because a main cable cannot be replaced once installed (Xinhua). The cable saddles were forged and welded rather than cast: the transport department reports a 30 per cent weight saving, Xinhua gives the largest single piece as 41.3 tonnes with compressive strength up 44 per cent. Twenty-one patents came out of the job.
Anshun’s reporter drove it on opening day. From the Huajiang toll gate on the Guanling side it was under twenty minutes to the visitor centre of the bridge tourist zone; from there a sightseeing lift climbs to a walkway threaded through the steel inside the bridge, with a transparent section where the 625 m drop is directly underfoot, and a small science corridor along the way. Also listed as running at opening: ropeless bungee, a high swing, the race track, anchorage rock climbing, a sky corridor, a stargazing bar and a water-curtain light show.
Named as planned rather than open: a cable car from the service area to the bridge abutment, a non-powered adventure playground, a Triassic-themed guesthouse, and a study base and hall. A café at the top of the lift was, on opening day, “expected to open in November” — that was November 2025, and no source we can retrieve confirms that it did. Treat the whole list as provisional until the operator confirms it for the date you are going.
The span figure has already turned into folklore. In Mandarin 1,420 reads as “love you for a lifetime” (一世爱你), and Anshun’s report counted nine couples who had registered their marriages that morning standing on the bridge that afternoon.
Two numbers do not line up, and it is worth knowing which. The vertical sightseeing lift appears in People’s Daily in July 2024 as a 200 m lift under construction, and in Anshun’s opening-day report as 207 m. The anchorage concrete is given by Xinhua as 160,000 cubic metres for a single anchorage, while People’s Daily puts the Anlong-side anchorage at 164,000 cubic metres out of 439,000 for the bridge as a whole. The gaps are stage of construction and which structure is being counted, not doubt — but if a figure matters to you, take the provincial transport department’s own page as the authority.
Three hundred kilometres of expressway east, in Qiannan, the Pingtang Grand Bridge opened in 2019: 2,135 m long, diamond-shaped towers, the tallest of them 332 m, which the provincial transport department describes as the tallest concrete bridge tower in the world. In 2021 it took the Gustav Lindenthal Award at the 38th International Bridge Conference.
What makes it the better stop for a visitor is the service area built beside it, at K249 of the Pingtang–Luodian expressway and running since 2020 — 196 mu of ground and 11,998 square metres of buildings, named by the Ministry of Transport in April 2020 as the province’s only transport-and-tourism demonstration service area, and rated a national AAA scenic site. Inside are a bridge museum, an astronomy hall and observation platform, a cliff-edge hotel, a campervan site, a hillside walkway and a viewing platform facing the bridge, with nearly 400 parking spaces and, from 2023, a study building for about 400 people. Qiannan’s government reports more than 480,000 visitors since 2021. It sits 30 km from the China Sky Eye (FAST) scenic area, which Qiannan’s account puts at about an hour’s drive. This is the one point on the route where the engineering is deliberately curated for outsiders: a museum, not a hard-hat tour.
Guiyang is the practical start. The provincial page puts the Sky Bridge service area a little over two hours’ drive from the city; the Huajiang bridge is west of there on the Liuzhi–Anlong expressway. No source we have gives a driving time between the two bridges, so plan two days rather than a loop, and do not compress them on a first trip.
Coming west afterwards, the same expressway system runs down to us in Xingyi — see the Guiyang to Xingyi route or the ways into Xingyi — where Wanfenglin, the Forest of Ten Thousand Peaks is the karst these bridges are strung across, seen from the ground. For entry rules, driving and payment, start with our practical notes, and the two-to-three-day itinerary if you want a shape for the western end. We are an English-speaking team based in Xingyi and can be reached through our tours page if you want the local half arranged.
Every attraction figure here is dated to the sources given below; the bridge tourism items were described at opening in September 2025 and we have not been able to confirm which are running now. Checked Sep 2026.
Facts above were checked on 11 September 2026 against the linked sources. Prices and visiting rules change; check live details when you book, or just ask us.