Explore wooden arch bridge building techniques of southeast China's Fujian (17)

Photo shows Huang Chuncai (front) producing wooden components for a bridge. (Photo/Ye Yingyang)

After the 44th Session of the World Heritage Committee dropped its curtain in Fuzhou, capital city of southeast China’s Fujian province, the general office of China’s State Council and the general office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) issued guidelines that required further efforts to protect intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in China.

As an important part of the excellence of Chinese culture, ICH embody the inheritance of the Chinese civilization and provides an important foundation for strengthening the bonds of solidarity. Starting today, People’s Daily Online will lead you to Fuzhou to show you some of the excellent crafts that have been carried forward by inheritors of intangible cultural heritage from generation to generation in a bid to raise awareness towards preserving, inheriting, and making good use of these valuable cultural assets.

The wooden arch bridge is an exclusive architectural style found in east China’s Zhejiang province and southeast China’s Fujian province. Instead of using building materials such as nails, the bridges were built using the mortise and tenon joint process, a concavo-convex connection method used to combine two pieces of wood. Bridges built with the application of such techniques are able to withstand the hazards of flooding and are able to stand strong even after 100 years of service. In 2008, the traditional design of the wooden arch bridge was inscribed into the UNESCO Intangible Heritage List.

Huang Chuncai, a man in his 80s, is a national inheritor of the wooden arch bridge building techniques based in Pingnan county, Fujian. Huang started to learn the techniques from his father when he was a child. Huang Minhui, one of Huang Chuncai’s two sons who together took over most of the responsibilities related to bridge building from their father, disclosed that as the wooden arch bridges have been replaced by modern bridges nowadays, they no longer build the wooden arch bridges but instead repair the ancient bridges in most cases.