A bit of history

While working on my homepage I found some interesting historical information about Guilin’s Liberation Bridge.

How can a bridge be interesting you may ask, but this special Bridge has quite some background:

People in Guilin always had the need to cross the river to get from one side (city center, palace) to the other (Seven Star park, etc) and vice versa.

Pretty early they started building a pontoon bridge, a construct made of boats, jointed by ropes and bamboo mats laid over them (Photo on the right). This bridge had the disadvantage that it had to be disassembled every time a number of boats wanted to pass the bridge.

In 1939 the people of Guilin build a more modern, steel framed bridge named after the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-sheck. This bridge, while much more stable than the old one survived only until 1944 when it was bombed by the Japanese.

After that, the Guilinese returned to their old pontoon bridge, but kept the same name as before.

In 1951, with the Generalissimo falling out of favour in China, a new concrete bridge was constructed and named “Liberation Bridge” the bridge lasted until 2001 when it was removed to make way for a new bridge that could handle the increasing amount of traffic.