In the eighteenth century, stonecutters in Yunnan laid three arches of blue limestone across the Lujiang River. They worked without mortar, fitting thousands of heavy slabs together so precisely that gravity alone held them fast. This initial structure served caravan trade routes during the Qianlong reign. Decades later, the neighboring Tachong River burst its banks, carved a new path, and merged with the Lujiang. The flood widened the riverbed by nearly one hundred meters, leaving the original three-arch bridge stranded in the middle of the expanded waters.

To restore the crossing in 1839, local gentry including Li Zhengying, Guo Tingyi, and Tang Wei organized a massive expansion. Funded by Gejiu tin merchants, workers added fourteen arches to the southern end, creating the 148.26-meter-long, seventeen-arch span we see today. The bridge stands nine meters high, its width narrowing from five meters on the older northern side to three meters on the newer southern section. The central arch spans 6.5 meters to channel the heaviest floods.

Three wooden pavilions once crowned the deck, though wars repeatedly reshaped them. In 1856, during the Panthay Rebellion, the original towers burned. Gejiu merchants funded their reconstruction in 1896, only for the northern pavilion to perish again in the 1916 National Defense War. Today, two structures remain. The central pavilion, known as the Southern Yunnan Grand View Tower, rises twenty meters with three stories of yellow glazed tiles and wind bells that chime in the river breeze. Its wooden doors feature carvings of the Eight Immortals and scenes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. On the south end, a smaller double-story pavilion features a hexagonal roof with upturned eaves.

Now protected as a national heritage site, the bridge stands as a monument to community resilience and engineering. Visitors can feel the cool, hand-chiseled limestone, hear the wind bells, and trace the seam where two eras of stone-carving meet.