China's Covered Bridges

China’s Covered Bridges: Architecture over Water is the first book in English to examine comprehensively one of the three great covered bridge traditions in the world. Based on decades of observation and ten years of intensive field research throughout China, this book illuminates countless covered bridges that have never been presented in a Western language.

Terry E. Miller, Ronald G. Knapp, and A. Chester Ong, whose America’s Covered Bridges: Practical Crossings, Nostalgic Icons, broke new ground, have joined here with Liu Jie, China’s leading timber covered bridge scholar. This team has traveled in areas rarely visited by others to document a living tradition whose roots go deep into Chinese history.

Long before professional engineers analyzed bridge structure mechanically, early builders in China, as in North America and Europe, solved the daunting problem of spanning deep ravines and wild rivers to facilitate the flow of pedestrians, animals, and vehicles. Their collective, yet independent, efforts represent the triumph of ingenuity and common sense.

Although there has been no census of covered bridges, and it is impossible to calculate how many existed in the past in China, some 3,000 remain, far more than found elsewhere in the world. Wooden trusses as understood in the West were not a component of China’s bridge-building traditions. Instead, covered corridors were situated atop either a masonry base or, more significantly, supported by an ingenious assemblage of timbers.

China’s Covered Bridges highlights covered bridges with a timber sub-structure, including both a variety of cantilevered forms and extraordinary "woven arch/woven arch-beam" types that until the until the last quarter of the 20th century were believed to have died out more than a millennium earlier.

The story of China’s covered bridges is fascinating not only in terms of technological achievement, social functioning, and aesthetic identity. Each covered bridge in China, whether still standing or long gone, has a story to tell about the nature of rural and urban life.

Thoroughly researched with a text of over 70,000 words and profusely illustrated with more than 600 historic and contemporary photographs, this book features the work of master photographer A. Chester Ong and is supplemented by photographs by the authors.

Like America’s Covered Bridges, China’s Covered Bridges is written in an accessible style that will satisfy not only those with general interests but also those with more specialized knowledge.