On the evening of August 6, a fire broke out in Changqiao village, Changqiao Town, Pingnan County, Fujian Province. In just 20 minutes, most of the Wan'an bridge in Pingnan, a national key cultural relics protection unit, was devoured by the fire devil. The wooden arch corridor bridge, which has been passed down for nearly a thousand years, is a unique variety in the history of bridges in the world. In this summer, it has entered the vision of the Chinese people in a sad way. In Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, there are still more than 100 wooden arch bridges across rivers and valleys, silently telling the legendary history of ancient Chinese bridge construction. This bridge "living fossil" from the picture of Qingming River is not only admired by people today, but also expected to be more carefully guarded. The Song Dynasty legacy in Fujian and Zhejiang mountains that night, the Wan'an bridge in Pingnan, the longest wooden arch corridor bridge in China, was destroyed by fire. Only one of the six span wooden structures was left, with only more than ten meters of bridgeheads and five isolated piers. On the second day of the incident, burnt wood was scattered in the river, and an old man wept on the bank. Local village cadres said that the bridge was the painstaking work of the older generation and an important passage in the village. The villagers felt sorry for its burning. According to records, Wan'an bridge was built in the 5th year of Yuanyou in the Northern Song Dynasty (1090). At that time, the woven wood arch bridge called Hongqiao was popular in the Central Plains. In Zhang Zeduan's Qingming Riverside painting, an arched bridge crosses the bianshui river like a flying rainbow. The bridge is bustling and the boats under the bridge are busy. This bridge, which embodies the prosperity of the Northern Song Dynasty, is the famous bianshui Hongqiao. During construction, beams and timbers are used to overlap and weave the timbers with limited length up and down to form a large-span column less arch bridge. The structure is simple but very strong. This kind of bridge building form that skillfully uses natural materials seems to have gradually lost its popularity after the Song Dynasty moved south. Until the 1980s, the academic circle was surprised to find many wooden arch bridges with "woven wood" arch structure like bianshui Hongqiao in Fujian and Zhejiang, and the bridge building technology was innovative, which is the Fujian and Zhejiang wooden arch corridor bridge. "There is a big difference in appearance between the wooden arch bridge and the rainbow bridge painted in the Qingming River. It can be said that it is version 2.0 of the wooden arch bridge." Su Xudong, chairman of the Pingnan County literary and Art Association, introduced that it is rainy in the south, and it is a normal operation to add gallery houses on wooden bridges. Such bridges are collectively referred to as wooden Gallery bridges. The "wooden arch corridor bridge" has one more "arch" than the "wooden corridor bridge", which means that the corridor bridge adopts the same arch structure as the bianshui Hongqiao bridge and can realize the maximum span of a single arch of the wooden bridge. Su Xudong said that the more than 110 existing ancient wooden arch bridges in China are mainly concentrated in Northeast Fujian and Southwest Zhejiang, where the mountains are high and the forests are dense and the valleys are deep and dangerous. Among them, Fujian Province accounts for more than 70%, and is mainly concentrated in the east of Fujian. According to experts, there are many mountains but few fields in Fujian and Zhejiang, especially in the northeast of Fujian and southwest of Zhejiang at the junction of the two provinces. The mountains are stacked, the gullies are vertical and horizontal, and the mountains are high and the rivers are deep. Because of the lack of flat land, the villages are mostly distributed along the valleys beside the streams, so the demand for bridges is particularly urgent. In addition, there are many trees in the mountains, and the craftsmen use local materials, so the traditional skill of weaving wooden arch bridges can be inherited for thousands of years. In recent years, Fujian and Zhejiang wooden arcade bridges have been well received by experts and scholars in the field of architecture and cultural relics
Edit：He Chuanning Responsible editor：Su Suiyue
Source：Xinhua
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