Chengyang Yongji Bridge
Interesting facts
- Dong villagers of the Chengyang 'eight villages' began the bridge in 1912 on their own initiative, raising money and labour themselves, and finished it in 1924.
- In 1936 a flash flood swept away the three pavilions on the southern half; villagers spent two months recovering the timbers, and rebuilding ran from 1939 to 1941.
- A flood in 1984 destroyed two of the stone piers, and the restoration was not completed until 1995.
- The piers are faced with dressed bluestone and filled with rubble, shaped like hexagonal boat prows with a 68-degree cutwater pointing upstream.
- The main beams are made of fir logs laid in two layers of seven, on which the gallery, pillars and tiled roofs are raised.
- Each pavilion is different: the central one has a hexagonal pointed roof, its neighbours square pointed roofs, and the two end pavilions hip-and-gable roofs.
- The bridge was listed as a national key cultural relic of China in 1982.
Why it is worth it
The Chengyang Yongji Bridge — also known as the Chengyang Wind and Rain Bridge or Panlong Bridge — is the most celebrated of the covered bridges built by the Dong people of southern China. It crosses the Linxi River in Sanjiang County in northern Guangxi, linking villages of the Chengyang area, and it was completed in the 1910s. Its long, roofed gallery, crowned by five tiered pavilions, is one of the finest examples of Dong timber architecture anywhere.
The bridge is 64.4 metres long and 3.4 metres wide, standing about 10 metres above the water on three massive stone piers. Everything above the piers is wood, and the carpentry is the marvel: the structure is held together by mortise-and-tenon joints without a single nail or iron fitting. Five pavilions rise from the roof above the piers and the ends, their stacked eaves curving upwards in the Dong manner, and the covered gallery between them is lined with benches where villagers rest, talk and shelter from the weather that gives this kind of bridge its name.
For the Dong a wind-and-rain bridge is more than a crossing: it is a place of gathering and is believed to bring good fortune, good weather and harvests to the village. A local legend about a dragon rescuing a young couple lies behind one of the bridge's other names. The writer Guo Moruo was so struck by it that he wrote a poem in its honour, and his calligraphy hangs on the bridge. It is protected as a national key cultural relic. Around it lie the Chengyang villages, with their wooden stilt houses and drum towers.
Getting there
The bridge is in Linxi township of Sanjiang County, roughly 220 km from Liuzhou; the nearest city in the listing is Hongzhou, about 34 km away. The nearest airport is Liping Airport (HZH), about 68 km away. Sanjiang has a railway station, and minibuses run from the county town to the bridge.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Yongji Bridge of Chengyang, also called the Chengyang Wind and Rain Bridge, is a bridge in Sanjiang County, of Guangxi, China.
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