Longteng Broken Bridge
Interesting facts
- The bridge was originally named after the stream it crossed, the Yutengping, and is still often called the Yutengping Broken Bridge.
- It was designed by the Japanese engineer Inagaki Hyōtarō, with the American bridge engineers Theodore Cooper and Charles Conrad Schneider as consultants.
- Its central span was a 61-metre Baltimore truss made by the American Bridge Company, flanked by six brick half-circle arches and two steel girder spans.
- In all it ran about 165 metres across nine spans and stood some 33 metres high.
- The bricks came from the Taipei area, while stone for the arches was quarried at Zhishanyan in Beitou.
- The 1935 earthquake opened cracks more than 5 centimetres wide in the arches, and an aftershock on 17 July brought down one arch completely.
- The replacement bridge, 80 metres to the west, took until 1938 and more than 410,000 workdays to build.
- The 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake snapped one of the surviving piers midway up.
- In 2001 the ruin was named one of Taiwan's top ten civil engineering heritage sites.
Why it is worth it
The Longteng Bridge is among the best-loved railway ruins in Taiwan: a row of red-brick piers standing in a green valley in Sanyi Township, Miaoli County, the arches that once linked them long gone. It was built in 1906 under Japanese rule to carry the railway across the valley, and completed on 30 January 1907. The design combined a central steel truss with approaches on multiple brick masonry arches, so that the valley was crossed by a long procession of arches with iron at its centre.
In April 1935 the Shinchiku–Taichū earthquake struck the region, and it and the aftershocks of that July damaged the bridge beyond repair: the masonry cracked and the ends of the truss were thrown out of line. A new iron bridge was built nearby — 50 metres tall and 200 metres long — and the old one was left to stand as it was. What remains today are the tall piers and fragments of arches, with vegetation growing on the brick, and it is this mix of engineering and decay that draws people. The site was designated a cultural heritage asset in 2003.
The best time to see it is in April and May, when the white blossoms of the tung trees in the surrounding hills drift down over the ruined piers — the local tung-blossom season has become closely associated with the bridge. The later railway through the area, known as the Former Mountain Line, carried trains until September 1998, when a newer route to the west replaced it; the old line between Sanyi and the south has since been reused for tourist rail bikes, which pass close to the broken bridge and give a view down onto its piers.
Getting there
The bridge stands in Longteng village, Sanyi Township, Miaoli County, in the hills of west-central Taiwan. The nearest airport is Taichung (RMQ), about 19 km away in a straight line. Sanyi station on the Taichung line is the railhead for the area and the start point of the Former Mountain Line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Longteng Bridge, officially known as the Yutengping Bridge, is a former bridge in Longteng Village, Sanyi Township, Miaoli County, Taiwan.
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