A spectacular 115-year-old railway bridge in Yunnan province stands as a reminder of the Chinese workers who died in its construction
After walking what seems like an eternity through eerily dark tunnels, a fading sunset comes into view over what was once an engineering marvel. Renziqiao, designed by French engineers and painstakingly built by Chinese workers 115 years ago, straddles a 65-meter-wide gorge in between two mountains 102 meters above the roaring Sicha River.
But the distinctive steel bridge, completed in 1908 to facilitate colonial trade from China’s southwest to French Indochina, came at a terrible human cost. This was one of the deadliest colonial construction projects ever inflicted on China, with an estimated 800 Chinese laborers dying during construction—around 12 lives lost for every meter of bridge laid.
Now, the bridge is something of a tourist site (along with a few other sections of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, like Bisezhai) located deep in the mountainous forests of Yunnan, around an hour from Pingbian city in Honghe Hani and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. Visitors make the journey to see a piece of history, to buy trinkets in a “traditional” Miao village that has recently been constructed around the bridge, and to remember the colonial legacy the French left in Yunnan. One plaque at the tourist site around Renziqiao bridge carries a quote from an unnamed French engineer involved in its design: “For each sleeper laid, a life taken, for each spike, a drop of blood.”
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