Bridge to the past
Many have seen the video of the container ship ramming into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the American city of Baltimore, breaking it apart like it was made of plywood. On March 26, at around 1:30am local time, the Singapore-registered MV Dali lost power and veered into a supporting pillar of the bridge, causing the entire steel structure to collapse.
The early Chinese mastered the technology of building bridges of considerable heft. Using wood and then stone, they built bridges that spanned waterways and connected trunk roads.
One of the country’s most well-known bridges is the Marco Polo Bridge, so named because the Venetian merchant who lived in China in the late 13th century described it as “a very fine stone bridge, so fine indeed, that it has very few equals in the world”. The Chinese call the 267-metre-long stone arch bridge, located 15km southwest of Beijing’s city centre, the Lugou Bridge.
Starting in 1189, construction of the bridge took three years and, when completed, travelling across the Lugou River was made much faster and easier.
The bridge underwent a dozen major refurbishments during the Ming and Qing dynasties (13681912), the last of which was in 1787.
The bridge became infamous in the early 20th century as the site of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, in 1937, considered the official start of the eight-year war between Japan and China.
In the early 20th centuries, Japan was a very different country. It was a fascist, militaristic state bent on building an empire across Asia and the Pacific. Japan’s thankfully brief ambitions were informed by its own propaganda that the Japanese were a superior race destined to lead all Asians.
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which involved an allegedly missing Japanese soldier, escalated tensions between Japanese and Chinese troops stationed there, marking the start of the second Sino-Japanese war, which lasted until September 1945, when Japan surrendered to the Allies.
The Lugou Bridge underwent major restoration in the mid-1980s, after which it was reopened as a heritage site. Today, the beautiful bridge is a popular destination for tourists.