China Built a Bridge Above the Clouds Did They Go Too Far?

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]625 [music] m. That's how high a road bridge in southern China rises above the river below it. High enough that on cloudy days, the deck floats above the weather itself. The clouds are under the road.

[00:00:13]The valley floor is invisible.

[00:00:15]>> [music] >> Tourists ride a glass elevator through one of the towers to a cafe at 800 m altitude, taller than every skyscraper in the United States. The bridge opened [music] just 7 months ago, and it didn't just become the world's highest crossing. It broke a record the global engineering community had been building toward for over 20 years. Today, I'll show you the eight Chinese bridges that defy belief. The rocket-launch suspension, the tunnel-to-tunnel span that doesn't touch the ground at either end, the cable-stayed giant that floats above a hydroelectric dam. Stay until the end because the bridge at number one isn't the highest. It's the one that started this entire era of cloud-piercing engineering.

[00:00:59]Number eight, the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, officially opened to the public [music] on the 28th of September 2025 in Guizhou province. According to Xinhua and the Belt and Road portal, the bridge [music] soars 625 m above the Beipan River. Certified by Guinness World Records in April 2026 at 626.01 [music] m, it is the highest bridge ever built.

[00:01:23]Total length, 2,890 m. Main span, 1,420 m. Two towers, 262 m and 205 m tall.

[00:01:37]22,000 tons of steel truss, equivalent to [music] roughly three Eiffel Towers.

[00:01:42]What's most extraordinary is what's on top. A glass elevator runs through one of the bridge towers carrying visitors up to a glass-walled cafe at around 800 m above the valley floor. According to NBC News, that single observation perch is taller than every skyscraper in the United States. Outside the cafe, a glass walkway hangs 800 m above the river, above the clouds that cover the canyon on misty days, with the bridge stretching off in both directions like a painted line through the sky.

[00:02:13]The trip across the canyon, which previously took 2 hours of switchback driving, now takes 2 minutes. And here's the part most people miss. The Huajiang Bridge isn't a one-off. The Beipan River alone has staged four [music] different world bridge height records over the past 20 years.

[00:02:30]The first record was set in 2003. The story of [music] how this bridge came to exist starts with that one. Stay with me. Number seven. The Beipanjiang Bridge Duge. The bridge that held the world record for 9 years until Huajiang took the crown.

[00:02:47]According to Guinness World Records, the Beipanjiang Bridge in Duge stood at 565.4 m above the Beipan River from [music] December 2016 until 2025. It opened on the 29th of December 2016. Total length, 1,341 m. Main span, 720 m. Towers, 269 and 247 m. This was the first cable-stayed bridge ever to hold the title of world's highest and the first bridge [music] in history to surpass the 500-m height barrier. It connects Guizhou and Yunnan provinces along the G56 Hangzhou-Ruili Expressway. The most striking thing is what it looks like.

[00:03:30]According to coverage in Unearth the Voyage, the canyon below the Duge Bridge regularly fills with fog so thick that drivers describe the experience as floating above nothing at all. The deck appears to hang in pure sky. The river below is invisible. The towers rise from the cloud cover like the masts of a ship breaking the surface of an ocean. And the next [music] bridge on this list is what made all of this possible. Because before any of these spans could be built, engineers had to figure out how to get a cable across the canyon in the first place. They solved that problem with a weapon. Number six, the Sidu River Bridge, 496 m above a gorge in Hubei province. Opened in 2009. From 2009 until 2016, this was the world's [music] highest bridge. The first bridge anywhere to use a method that nobody outside of China had ever attempted at that scale. Wait. Listen to this. The canyon at Sidu is so steep, so narrow, and so prone to vertical wind shear that helicopters could not safely fly the first guide cable across [music] the gorge. The engineers had a problem. You can't build a suspension bridge until you have a wire connecting the two sides. You need that wire to pull a thicker wire, and another, and eventually the main suspension cable.

[00:04:46]But how do you get the first wire across when no aircraft can safely cross the gap? They solved it with a rocket.

[00:04:53]According to documentation in the Allplan Engineering Database and We Build Value, in 2006, Chinese engineers attached the pilot cable to the back of a small military rocket and fired it across the canyon. The rocket carried the wire from one cliff to the other in seconds. From that single thread, every other cable on the bridge was hauled across. The Sidu River Bridge was the first [music] suspension bridge in the world to use a rocket-launched pilot cable. Two more would follow. The bridge itself is 1,222 m long. Main span, 900 m. The main suspension cables are made of 127 [music] parallel wire strands bundled into hexagonal shape. And the next bridge [music] on this list is the second time China fired a rocket across a canyon to build a road. Number five, the Puli Bridge, [music] located near Xuanwei in Qujing City, Yunnan Province. 485 m above the Puli Creek Gorge. According to Wikipedia and highestbridges.com, the Puli Bridge opened to traffic on the 25th of August, 2015. Main span, 628 m.

[00:06:01]Total length, [music] 1,040 m. Cost, 440 million yuan, approximately [music] 71 million US dollars. The Puli Bridge is the second highest suspension bridge in the world after the Huajiang. And like Sidu, the first cable was placed using a rocket fired across the canyon. The bridge cut the road journey from Xuanwei to the Guizhou border [music] from 4 hours down to 1. The detail that makes the Puli Bridge stand out is the deck. According to bridge engineering coverage in highest bridges, where almost every other Chinese suspension bridge of this height uses an open steel truss to hold the road surface, Puli uses a thin steel box girder, just 3 m deep, 28 and 1/2 m wide. The bridge looks almost flat against the sky. The road appears to float, anchored by cables that disappear upward into the towers. We're halfway through. The next four bridges [music] include one that floats over a hydroelectric dam reservoir, one that doesn't actually touch the ground at either end, and the bridge at number one, the bridge that started the entire era of Chinese cloud-piercing engineering. The first road [music] bridge anywhere in the world to break the 300 m height barrier. Built [music] in 2003 on the same Baipan River where the world's highest bridge stands today.

[00:07:21]Number four, the Jin'an Bridge. [music] Officially, the Jinshajiang Bridge Jin'an in Yunnan province. 461 m above the Jinshajiang, the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. Opened in 2020.

[00:07:35]Here's what makes Jin'an extraordinary.

[00:07:36][music] According to coverage in All Plan and Bridge Engineering Records, the bridge runs [music] directly above the Jinankiao hydroelectric dam. When the reservoir is at maximum water level, it raises the river surface by up to 126 [music] m, reducing the bridge's effective height to roughly 335 m. When the reservoir drops, the bridge's effective height returns to 461.

[00:08:02]The same bridge, same [music] deck, same cables, but the height of the structure depends on how much electricity China is generating that month. Most engineers consider [music] this the only bridge in the world whose recorded height changes with the seasons. It is also the only bridge in the world's top 10 that overlooks an active hydroelectric power station from above. From the deck, drivers can see both the Yangtze River's upper waters and the dam infrastructure that captures them. Two of China's largest engineering categories, ultra-high bridges and major hydroelectric dams, stacked vertically in the same canyon. Number three, the Aizhai Bridge.

[00:08:40]>> [music] >> In Hunan province, on the G65 Baojing-Maoming Expressway. 336 m above the Dehang Canyon, this is the pattern interrupt. Aizhai isn't the highest bridge on this list, not the longest, not the most expensive, but it does something no other bridge in the top eight can do. [music] According to highestbridges.com, the Aizhai Bridge is the world's longest tunnel-to-tunnel [music] bridge span.

[00:09:07]Main span, 1,176 m. [music] The deck does not touch the ground at either end. On both sides, the bridge emerges [music] directly from a road tunnel cut through the mountain face, carries traffic across the canyon, and disappears back into another tunnel cut through the opposite mountain. There are no approach roads, no on-ramps, no off-ramps.

[00:09:31]>> [music] >> The bridge has no shoulder, no emergency lane. It begins inside a mountain. It ends inside a mountain.

[00:09:39]From the perspective of a driver, you enter a tunnel.

[00:09:42]>> [music] >> The world goes dark. The world reopens onto a deep canyon for 1 minute and 17 seconds, and the world goes dark again.

[00:09:51]According to coverage in Highest Bridges, the walkway built inside the truss of the bridge in 2015 allowed visitors for the first time to look down through grating to the canyon floor over 1,000 ft below. And the next bridge on this list is the cable-stayed counterpart to Aizhai Suspension. The 800-m main span that defines what Chinese engineering can do when working strictly with steel in tension. Number two, the Yachi River Bridge. 434 m above the Yachi River Canyon in Guizhou province on the road that connects Bijie to Guiyang. Opened in 2016, the same year the Beipanjiang Duge Bridge took the world height record. Main span, 800 m. Total length, 1,466 m. Pylons, 258 and 242 m. Investment, 780 million yuan. What's most striking about Yachi is the design. [music] It's a cable-stayed bridge, not a suspension bridge with 15 separate spans [music] across the canyon. The central span being the 800-m clear span between the two main towers. According to engineering coverage in We Build Value and the Allplan database, this is one of the few cable-stayed bridges anywhere in the world that exceeds [music] 400 m in height. Most cable-stayed designs above 400 m rely on shorter individual spans [music] with the load distributed across multiple towers. Yachi maintains an 800-m clear span at 434 m of altitude.

[00:11:24]The Yachi Bridge cut the journey between Bijie and Guiyang, cities that previously had no direct expressway [music] connection, from over 4 hours to roughly an hour and a half. It is part of the same wave of Guizhou mega projects that [music] have made the province the bridge engineering capital of the world. Number one, the Beipanjiang Bridge Guanxing. 366 m above the Beipan River in Guizhou province.

[00:11:49]Opened on the 28th of December, 2003.

[00:11:53]This is the bridge the loop comes back to because in 2003, when this span [music] opened, it became the first sus pension bridge anywhere in the world to surpass the 300 m height threshold.

[00:12:04]According to Wikipedia and highestbridges.com, it was the second Chinese bridge in 2 years to claim the world's highest title following the Liuguanghe Beam Bridge in 2001. The Beipanjiang Guanxing held the global record from late 2003 until 2005.

[00:12:21]According to Wikipedia and highestbridges.com, the Beipanjiang Bridge Guanxing carries the Guanxing Highway between Zhenfeng County and Guanling County. Main span, 388 m of suspension. Two anchor towers built into the cliffs of the Beipan River Canyon. The bridge deck is just 2/3 of a meter thick. A slab of prestressed concrete supported by cable suspenders spaced 5 m apart. Here's what changes the picture. From 2003 onwards, the Beipan River alone has staged four different world bridge height records.

[00:12:57]Beipanjiang Guanxing in '03, the Baling River Bridge, not on this list, but built in '09. Beipanjiang Duge in 2016, which we covered at number seven, and Huajiang in 2025, which we covered at number eight. According to Smithsonian Magazine and the Belt and Road Portal, China is now home to seven of the world's 10 highest bridges. Three of those are over the Beipan River, the single river that has defined high bridge engineering on Earth for over 20 years. And it all started with the bridge at number one, the first. These are the eight Chinese bridges that defy belief. The Huajiang span built above the clouds, the Beipanjiang Duge that wore the crown for nine years, the Sidu River Bridge built using a rocket fired across a canyon, the Aizhai tunnel-to-tunnel span that doesn't touch the ground at either end, and the Beipanjiang Guanxing, the first 300-m road bridge in the world. At this scale, bridges stop being roads. They become geography, redrawing what counts as connected and what counts as separated.

[00:13:59]What's your reaction watching this? Let me know in the comments. These eight bridges show what Chinese engineering does when it builds at altitude. But what's being built down at ground level, on roads, at racetracks, is moving even faster, literally. China just built the fastest production car ever made, 308 mph, faster than any Bugatti, any Koenigsegg, any car ever sold in serial production. Electric, designed in Shenzhen. And before it set the speed record, it learned to do something no production car has ever done before. It learned to dance. In the next one, I'll show you exactly what it is, who made it, how it set the record, and the moment the engineers turned its suspension into something nobody outside China has been able to replicate. See you in the next [music] one.