Two hours became two minutes. That is the saving for anyone crossing the Huajiang Grand Canyon in southwest China’s Guizhou Province since Sunday morning, when the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge opened to traffic on Sept. 28, 2025, after three years of construction. Xinhua called it the world’s tallest bridge.
Its deck sits 625 meters above the Beipan River. For scale, that is nearly nine times the height of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
The numbers
The structure is 2,890 meters long, with a main span of 1,420 meters. Guizhou provincial authorities say that makes it the world’s longest-span steel truss girder suspension bridge in mountainous terrain. The canyon it crosses has a nickname: “the Earth’s crack.”
The previous record-holder, the Duge Bridge, also crosses the Beipan River. It opened in 2016 and has a vertical clearance of 565.4 meters from deck to water, which puts the new bridge about 60 meters higher.
A province built on bridges
Guizhou is one of China’s least developed provinces, and its mountains leave builders little choice. Over the years it has put up more than 30,000 bridges, including three of the world’s tallest. Nearly half of the world’s 100 tallest bridges are in the province.
Xinhua described the new span as the latest addition to the infrastructure network of the world’s second-largest economy. Photos from the opening show vehicles on the deck, and visitors at a viewing skywalk and a nearby service area who came to look at the bridge.
