Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge

The Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, opened in 1957, was the first road and rail bridge to cross the Yangtze and is still one of the iconic objects of Chinese infrastructure. It links Snake Hill in Wuchang with Tortoise Hill in Hanyang in a single 1,670-metre double-deck steel truss — the upper deck for road traffic, the lower for trains on the Beijing-Guangzhou railway.

The bridge replaced a railway ferry service and at the time was one of the most ambitious construction projects in the new People's Republic, built with Soviet engineering help. It is also one of Mao's literary subjects — he wrote a poem about it after swimming the river beneath it in 1956. Walk across on the pedestrian path for the best views back at the city.

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A story
When it opened in 1957, the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge was the first bridge to cross the Yangtze and a national engineering symbol. Before it, the only way over the river for thousands of kilometres was by ferry. Mao Zedong, who liked to swim across the Yangtze, wrote a famous poem celebrating the bridge's construction.