Liuchehe Bridge

Liuchehe Bridge
六车河特大桥
Machang Village, Guizhou, China
(1,312) feet high / (400) meters high
865 foot span / 263.5 meter span
2026

The Liuchehe Bridge is a double span CFST arch bridge that ranks along with the nearby Guniuhe Bridge as the two highest arch bridges on earth as well as the only two arch bridges to exceed the 400 meter height threshold.

The eastbound and westbound structures measure 870 and 892.4 meters long with nine approach spans of 30 meters on the east side with the two consecutive arch crossings of 270 meters on the west side with the clear span measurements of 263.457 meters for each arch. The two CFST Concrete Filled Steel Tubular spans have span to rise ratios of 1:5 and 1:5.3. The first design for a bridge over the Wudu River consisted of a single tower cable stayed bridge with two equal spans of 360 meters.

The type of CFST or Concrete Filled Steel Tubular truss arch used for the Liuchehe may look common but the Chinese have taken it one step further, developing it into a unique type of structure all its own. The six large steel tubes that run along the underside of the Liuchehe arch were initially hollow. Once the arch was closed, concrete was pumped into these tubes from the bottom up. First used by the Chinese in 1990, they have refined and improved the technique and now use it on the majority of their steel arch bridges. Depending on the length of the span and the width of the bridge, different styles of tubing are used. For Liuchehe, they adopted an array of single tubes spaced apart from each other. Other configurations include dumbbells with two tubes closely connected, a mix of a dumbbell and single tubes such as was done on the Beipanjiang River Railway bridge or a tight cluster of tubes known as “multiple contiguous”. Once hardened, the concrete solidifies and stiffens the arch, improving the compressive strength of the entire structure.

As there are several Chinese CFST (Concrete Filled Steel Tubular) bridges on this website, you may find the following in depth article to be informative.

New Development of Long Span Concrete Filled Steel Tube Arch Bridges in China (~800kB)

Liuchehe Bridge is one of several spectacular high level crossings on the amazing Anpan Expressway that cuts across an extremely mountainous section of Guizhou Province between Panzhou near the Guizhou/Yunnan border and Anshun in Guizhou Province. The Anpan is the only expressway in the world to have five bridges that exceed 300 meters in height including Liuchehe, Tianmen, Guniuhe, Wumengshan and Liuzhi Bridges.

The Tianmen suspension bridge is the third crossing of the Beipan River to exceed 500 meters in height and is located just 12 kilometers east of the Liuchehe Bridge.