The world’s highest Beipanjiang Bridge, which is as high as a 200-story building, opened to the public on Thursday in southwest China’s Guizhou Province. It is the latest example of how Chinese engineering now ranks among the best worldwide.

The 1,341-meter-long bridge soars 565 meters above the Beipanjiang Valley, with the famous Eiffel Tower measuring out to just over half of its height. It has also just overtaken the Sidu River Bridge in Hubei Province to become the world’s highest, according to Guizhou transportation officials.

The construction work started from October 2013 with a total cost of about a billion yuan (143 million US dollars).

“We developed a new kind of technology called "cantilever erection by longitudinal launching," and this significantly shortened construction time,” said Zhou Ping, director of the Beipanjiang project.

“Construction is affected by wind, requiring a high degree of precision. Transporting materials to the canyon was very difficult. Usually, we transport assembled sections. But on this project, we did the opposite, transporting parts and assembling them on site,” noted Wang Chao, senior engineer at Ministry of Transport’s highway planning institute.

Liu Bo, Deputy Chief Engineer with CCCC Highway Consultants Co. Ltd. said, ''Where to place the bridge piers was a problem. The gorge here is over 500 meters deep, so how are we going to design the structure of the bridge to deal with the strong wind field problem?''

Despite construction challenges, the massive suspension bridge connects the Guizhou and Yunnan Provinces, and is constructed to shorten the travel time in between from the previous five hours to an hour and a half. 

The span is expected to boost logistics and attract new investment as part of the Hangzhou-Ruili highway that links eastern and southwestern China.

(Reported by CCTV Liu Yang)