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Why the Highest Bridge on Earth Is in China's Guizhou Province, Source & Pace (The WEDGE Method LLC).

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Why the Highest Bridge on Earth Is in China's Guizhou Province on YouTube

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  1. 0:00 “The road on this bridge runs 625 metres above the river below it, according to the government of Guizhou province in south-west China.” [c01.00, as reported]
  2. 0:09 “It is the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge. When it opened to traffic on the 28th of September 2025, state media called it the world's highest bridge.” [c01.01, as reported]
  3. 0:21 “AFP reported that it took the record from another bridge in the same province.” [c01.02, as reported]
  4. 0:26 “That bridge, which Xinhua calls the Beipanjiang First Bridge, also crosses the Beipan River, Smithsonian magazine reports.” [c01.03, as reported]
  5. 0:34 “So why does a single river, in this corner of south-west China, hold both of them?” [c01.04, framing (no factual claim)]
  6. 0:40 “To find out, we'll go down: from the road, through the cables and the wind, to the canyon walls, and to the river and the bill at the bottom.” [c01.05, framing (no factual claim)]
  7. 0:58 “Smithsonian describes it as a suspension bridge with two lanes of traffic in each direction.” [c02.00, as reported]
  8. 1:04 “Xinhua says it is 2,890 metres long, with a main span of 1,420 metres.” [c02.01, as reported]
  9. 1:13 “It is the key structure on the expressway from Liuzhi to Anlong, according to Xinhua.” [c02.02, as reported]
  10. 1:19 “Guizhou Daily, in a report carried on China Daily's Chinese website, says the bridge joins Guanling county on one side of the canyon to Zhenfeng county on the other.” [c02.03, as reported]
  11. 1:30 “It is named after the Huajiang canyon, which the same report says is known as the crack of the Earth.” [c02.04, as reported]
  12. 1:37 “The same report says work began on the 18th of January 2022: three years and eight months before it opened.” [c02.05, as reported]
  13. 1:46 “What does the deck change for the people on either side? The provincial transport chief gave an answer.” [c02.06, framing (no factual claim)]
  14. 1:53 “Four days before it opened, she said it would cut the travel time between the two sides of the canyon from two hours to two minutes.” [c02.07, as reported]
  15. 2:02 “It is also built to be visited. Smithsonian says a high-speed glass elevator takes visitors to a cafe at the top of one of the towers.” [c02.08, as reported]
  16. 2:11 “Smithsonian reports that the village of Huajiang, beneath the bridge, has seen a rush of visitors; one innkeeper told China Daily the inn had been fully booked for days.” [c02.09, as reported]
  17. 2:22 “Guizhou Daily reports that the bridge has a high swing, a racing track and rock climbing on an anchorage.” [c02.10, as reported]
  18. 2:33 “A level down are the parts that hold the road up.” [c03.00, framing (no factual claim)]
  19. 2:37 “Washington State's transport department describes how a suspension bridge works. The road deck hangs from cables that pass over the tops of high towers.” [c03.01, as reported]
  20. 2:48 “The department says the main cables run from an anchorage at one end, over the towers, to an anchorage at the other.” [c03.02, as reported]
  21. 2:55 “According to the same explainer, most of the bridge's weight, and the weight of the vehicles on it, hangs from those cables.” [c03.03, as reported]
  22. 3:03 “And it says the anchorages at each end are normally either a mass of concrete or solid rock.” [c03.04, as reported]
  23. 3:11 “Huajiang uses two different kinds, according to Guizhou's transport department, which approved a tunnel anchorage on the Liuzhi bank and a gravity anchorage on the Anlong bank.” [c03.05, as reported]
  24. 3:22 “At Huajiang, the deck under the road is a steel truss. Engineers Ireland reported that it is made up of 93 segments.” [c03.06, as reported]
  25. 3:31 “The segments were hoisted into place with what a senior engineer on the project called the world's largest-span cable hoisting system.” [c03.07, as reported]
  26. 3:41 “Guizhou Daily, in its report carried by China Daily, says that system placed the steel with millimetre precision, about 600 metres up.” [c03.08, as reported]
  27. 3:51 “According to Xinhua's photo record of the build, the towers came first, then a temporary walkway for workers along the cable line, called a catwalk.” [c03.09, as reported]
  28. 4:01 “Xinhua says the steel deck was hoisted next; then the deck was joined up, the bridge was load-tested, and it opened.” [c03.10, as reported]
  29. 4:09 “According to Xinhua's captions, the towers were under construction in November 2023, and the catwalk was being built in March 2024.” [c03.11, as reported]
  30. 4:19 “The contractor, Guizhou Bridge Group, says crews hauled the cable strands across by day and adjusted them at night, because the summer heat made them stretch.” [c03.12, as reported]
  31. 4:30 “Guizhou Daily's report also says the builders monitor the temperature, humidity and stress along each main cable with optical fibres, linked to a system that dries the cable.” [c03.13, as reported]
  32. 4:42 “It also says a new forged-and-welded saddle, where the cable passes over a tower, is 30 per cent lighter.” [c03.14, as reported]
  33. 4:53 “Below the deck there is nothing but air. And for a suspension bridge, moving air is a serious load.” [c04.00, framing (no factual claim)]
  34. 5:02 “Washington State's transport department says suspension bridges, being relatively light and flexible, are all susceptible to wind.” [c04.01, as reported]
  35. 5:11 “Washington State has its own reason to know. The department says the state's 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge was designed for winds up to 120 miles per hour, and collapsed in a wind of only 42.” [c04.02, as reported]
  36. 5:25 “The department says the lesson was that engineers had to test suspension bridge designs with models in a wind tunnel.” [c04.03, as reported]
  37. 5:32 “The department says wind-tunnel testing of bridge designs has become commonplace.” [c04.04, as reported]
  38. 5:38 “At Huajiang, the contractor says, the project and Tongji University measured the site's wind with Doppler lidar, then ran wind-tunnel tests.” [c04.05, as reported]
  39. 5:48 “In a Guizhou canyon, wind is part of the design brief. Alimak, a Swedish company that supplied equipment for the build, said the plateau setting makes year-round valley winds likely.” [c04.06, as reported]
  40. 6:01 “Guizhou Daily reports that part of the answer was a set of stabilising plates: an upper and a lower horizontal plate, plus a central one.” [c04.07, as reported]
  41. 6:10 “The report adds that the lower plate doubles as the racing track.” [c04.08, as reported]
  42. 6:15 “The provincial government says the bridge's wind-resistance design and high-altitude construction earned 21 authorised patents.” [c04.09, as reported]
  43. 6:27 “Now the walls of the canyon. They are the reason this bridge, and so many others, exist.” [c05.00, framing (no factual claim)]
  44. 6:33 “A 2016 research report by China's National Development and Reform Commission says 92.5 per cent of Guizhou's land is mountains and hills.” [c05.01, as reported]
  45. 6:45 “The same report says flat land able to carry industry and people is extremely scarce.” [c05.02, as reported]
  46. 6:52 “People's Daily's overseas edition calls Guizhou the only province in China without the support of a plain.” [c05.03, as reported]
  47. 7:00 “In a place like that, a road can either wind down into each gorge and climb back out, or cross it.” [c05.04, framing (no factual claim)]
  48. 7:08 “Smithsonian, citing NBC News, says that in the 1980s the province had about 2,900 bridges.” [c05.05, as reported]
  49. 7:16 “In September 2025, Xinhua reported that Guizhou had more than 32,000 bridges, built or under construction.” [c05.06, as reported]
  50. 7:26 “A 2025 credit-rating report on the province says its expressway network has passed 9,000 kilometres.” [c05.07, as reported]
  51. 7:34 “Why build at this pace? An engineer at Southwest Jiaotong University, Li Mingshui, told the Washington Post that many regions in western China remain poorly connected, unlike the US, which already has a highly developed highway system.” [c05.08, as reported]
  52. 7:52 “Mamdouh El-Badry, an engineer at the University of Calgary in Canada, told Newsweek that China has given priority to large-scale projects to drive development and connectivity.” [c05.09, as reported]
  53. 8:03 “And Xinhua says nearly half of the world's 100 highest bridges are in Guizhou.” [c05.10, as reported]
  54. 8:09 “The record used to be American. The operators of Colorado's Royal Gorge Bridge say it held the title of world's highest bridge until 2001.” [c05.11, as reported]
  55. 8:20 “They say it is suspended 956 feet above the Arkansas River, about 291 metres.” [c05.12, as reported]
  56. 8:28 “The engineering database Structurae says a Guizhou bridge completed in 2001, the Liuguanghe Bridge, stands 297 metres above the valley floor.” [c05.13, as reported]
  57. 8:43 “At the bottom is the river. And at the bottom of every bridge like this, there is also a bill.” [c06.00, framing (no factual claim)]
  58. 8:51 “Guizhou's finance department published its own debt tables for 2024.” [c06.01, sourced]
  59. 8:56 “They put the province's general-category debt at the end of 2024 at about 868 billion yuan, as a preliminary estimate.” [c06.02, sourced]
  60. 9:07 “And special-purpose debt at about 886 billion yuan.” [c06.03, sourced]
  61. 9:12 “Together, that was roughly 1.75 trillion yuan. A credit-rating agency's 2025 report on Guizhou's bonds says the total rose 15.9 per cent in a year.” [c06.04, as reported]
  62. 9:26 “In January 2026, the finance department reported the province's debt at the end of 2025 as about 1.94 trillion yuan, a preliminary figure.” [c06.05, sourced]
  63. 9:38 “Xinhua, citing the bridge's operator, says its tourism projects alone had received 3.3 million visits by its first anniversary.” [c06.06, as reported]
  64. 9:48 “Those are visitor counts, not toll revenue.” [c06.07, framing (no factual claim)]
  65. 9:51 “The agency, China Securities Pengyuan, calls Guizhou's debt relatively high. It still rates the province's bonds AAA, and says outside support in a crisis is very likely.” [c06.08, as reported]
  66. 10:03 “These are official government-debt figures. Under China's Budget Law, such borrowing may pay only for public-interest capital spending, not for day-to-day costs.” [c06.09, sourced]
  67. 10:15 “According to Xinhua, the bridge's builder is the provincial transport investment group.” [c06.10, as reported]
  68. 10:22 “Zhang Yulu of the Liu'an Expressway Company put the bridge's cost at about 2 billion yuan, Guizhou Daily reported in May 2023.” [c06.11, as reported]
  69. 10:31 “That is about 298 million US dollars at the Federal Reserve's rate on the 2nd of October 2026: an estimate from before the bridge was finished.” [c06.12, as reported]
  70. 10:43 “Guizhou's transport department said the bridge's opening marked the opening of the whole expressway. In a design approval published in January 2021, it had set an estimate of about 24.5 billion yuan for that road.” [c06.13, as reported]
  71. 10:57 “According to the department's table, that included about 5.2 billion yuan for bridges and culverts along the route, and about 1.46 billion for interest on loans during construction.” [c06.14, as reported]
  72. 11:10 “That is the whole road, not the bridge alone, and the approval says the final cost is whatever the completion accounts show.” [c06.15, as reported]
  73. 11:19 “The same rating report shows how much of Guizhou's budget comes from above. In 2024, it says, transfers from higher levels of government brought in about 392 billion yuan.” [c06.16, as reported]
  74. 11:33 “That was more than the province's own general budget revenue, which the report puts at about 217 billion yuan.” [c06.17, as reported]
  75. 11:42 “Years before Huajiang opened, the central government's planners had already put the risk plainly.” [c06.18, as reported]
  76. 11:48 “Their 2016 report said Guizhou's urbanisation drive, including catching up on infrastructure, needed heavy up-front investment with long payback periods, and that without enough cash flow, repaying the debt would become a problem.” [c06.19, as reported]
  77. 12:07 “Which brings us back to the number we started with.” [c07.00, framing (no factual claim)]
  78. 12:11 “In April 2026, Xinhua reported that Guinness World Records had listed the bridge as the highest bridge, at 626.01 metres.” [c07.01, as reported]
  79. 12:22 “The previous record, Xinhua said, was the Beipanjiang First Bridge, on the Yunnan–Guizhou border, certified by Guinness in 2018 at 565.4 metres.” [c07.02, as reported]
  80. 12:36 “Xinhua also says all of the height data used for the certification came from Chinese surveying technology.” [c07.03, as reported]
  81. 12:43 “So both numbers come from Chinese sources: the 625 metres from the provincial government, and the 626.01, which Xinhua says was certified using data from Chinese surveying technology.” [c07.04, as reported]
  82. 12:58 “We have not found an independent survey of the height.” [c07.05, framing (no factual claim)]
  83. 13:02 “And a last distinction. Highest is not the same as tallest.” [c07.06, framing (no factual claim)]
  84. 13:08 “AFP noted when Huajiang opened that the world's tallest bridge, measured by the height of its own structure rather than the distance to the ground, remained France's Millau Viaduct, at 343 metres.” [c07.07, as reported]
  85. 13:23 “Huajiang's height comes from the canyon it crosses, in a province where, according to the planners' report, flat land able to carry industry and people is extremely scarce.” [c07.08, as reported]

Sources

Corrections are listed with their time stamp under CORRECTIONS in the video's description; a correction that changes what the video claims also goes at the top of the description and in the pinned comment.