Guizhou’s towering Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge transforms travel and tourism

The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge turned one of Guizhou’s most punishing canyon crossings into a two-minute drive, rising 625 meters above the Beipan River and stretching 2,890 meters across the Huajiang Grand Canyon. Opened to traffic on Sept. 28, 2025 after three years of construction, the bridge has quickly become both a transport shortcut and a destination, drawing visitors to a structure that officials call the world’s highest bridge.

Its arrival fits a much larger push in Guizhou province, one of China’s least developed regions and a place with no plains, where bridges and tunnels have long been the only way to stitch communities together. Provincial officials say Guizhou has built or is building more than 32,000 bridges, about ten times the number in the 1980s, and the Huajiang crossing is now being folded into a tourism network marketed as a “one-hour golden tourism circle.” That network ties together Huangguoshu Waterfall, Shuangru Mountain, Malinghe Canyon and the Wanfenglin scenic area.

The early tourism numbers are striking. During the Spring Festival holiday in February 2026, Guizhou officials said the bridge drew about 300,000 visitor arrivals and more than 70,000 vehicle entries and exits. In 2025, Anshun recorded 66 million tourist visits and 17 million overnight stays, increases of 13% and 24% from a year earlier. Local authorities have also used the bridge to support new attractions around the canyon, including sightseeing elevators, glass walkways, cafes inside cable towers and bungee jumping over a waterfall.

For residents, the bridge is not only a spectacle but also a measure of how isolated the region once was. A project manager with Guizhou Communications Investment Group recalled a hometown where there was only one bus a day to the county seat and then only one more to the provincial capital, with passengers sometimes riding on roof luggage racks. That memory hangs over the new highway link, which cut a trip across the canyon from about two hours to about two minutes and has helped expand high-speed 5G internet coverage in nearby remote communities.

The test now is whether these gains last beyond the selfie rush. Faster roads and stronger digital networks can broaden access to jobs, visitors and information, but Guizhou’s bridge boom also shows how easily infrastructure can serve a top-down development narrative unless remote communities gain durable income, local control and equal access to the benefits it promises.