Fengchuikou Bridge of the Yuehan Railway Site

High above the rushing Baisha River in Baishidu Town, a massive concrete monument stands silent against the mountain wind. This is the Fengchuikou Bridge, an eighty-eight-meter-long span of the historic Yuehan Railway. Built during a time of national crisis, it remains one of the celebrated Five Arch Bridges along the Hunan-Guangdong border.

In October 1932, chief engineer Ling Hongxun surveyed this challenging mountain pass. To avoid the prohibitive cost of imported steel, he chose to build with locally mixed concrete. Chinese engineers Liang Xudong and Zhang Jinpin took charge of the construction in early 1935. Hundreds of laborers poured wet concrete into wooden molds, working on the steep, dizzying cliffs of the river valley. By late March 1936, they completed the three-span, upper-deck structure. It featured a thirty-meter central arch flanked by two twenty-meter side arches, a design that avoided the need for expensive retaining walls on the unstable slopes.

The bridge entered official service on September 1, 1936, engineered to support heavy locomotives under the Cooper’s E-50 loading standard. For over fifty years, steam and diesel engines rumbled across its six-meter-wide deck, shaking the deep green waters below. The bridge survived wars and mergers, eventually becoming part of the busy Beijing-Guangzhou Railway.

In 1988, the completion of a double-track bypass silenced the old line. Workers removed the iron tracks, leaving a flat, gravel-strewn path. Today, the bridge serves as a quiet pedestrian road connecting rural communities. Visitors walking across the deck can look down at the sheer drop to the river, feeling the same cold draft that gave the bridge its name. On the concrete wall, the original hand-carved inscription still catches the sunlight: "1936 · Fengchuikou Bridge · Ling Hongxun." It is a physical mark of the human hands that shaped China's industrial dawn.