Sidu River Bridge

The Sidu River Bridge spans a gorge in the Wuling Mountains southwest of Enshi with a central span of 900 metres and a deck height of 496 metres above the river — by most measurements the world's highest bridge above a valley floor when it opened in 2009, a title it has shared and contested with subsequent bridges in Guizhou. The approach to the bridge, through mountain tunnels and along cliff-hugging roads, is itself a piece of engineering bravado characteristic of the infrastructure push that connected western Hubei's remote mountain valleys to the national highway network in the 2000s.

The bridge is a detour from the main Enshi attractions, about 60 kilometres southwest of the city, but the combination of the engineering story, the vertiginous gorge views from the deck, and the mountain scenery of the surrounding Lichuan County makes it worth the trip if you have a car. The observation points on either side of the gorge give the best sense of the scale; looking down through the cloud at the river 500 metres below is one of the more memorable vertigo experiences in a part of China that has several.

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A story
The cables for the Sidu River Bridge were installed using rockets — conventional methods couldn't get lines across the 900-metre-wide, 500-metre-deep gorge, so engineers fired rocket-propelled pilot lines from one side to the other, then used those to haul progressively heavier cables across. It remains, as far as anyone has been able to verify, the only bridge in history whose construction required a rocket launch.

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