Opinion | After Baltimore bridge collapse shocks the world, a look at China’s ancient Marco Polo Bridge, known for different reasons

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Very early on in their history, the Chinese had mastered the technology of building bridges of considerable heft. Using wood, and then stone, they built bridges that spanned waterways and connected trunk roads.

Cranes stand by as the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge rests on the container ship MV Dali, on Saturday, March 30, 2024, four days after the crash that resulted in the bridge’s collapse. Photo: AP
One of the most well-known bridges in modern Chinese history is the Marco Polo Bridge, so named because the Venetian merchant, explorer and writer who visited and lived in China in the late 13th century described it, in The Travels of Marco Polo, as “a very fine stone bridge, so fine indeed, that it has very few equals in the world”.

The Chinese call the stone arch bridge, 268 metres (880ft) long and 15 kilometres (9 miles) southwest of Beijing’s city centre, the Lugou Bridge.

Chinese mastered the skills needed to build substantial stone bridges early on in their history. Photo: Getty Images

Construction of the bridge began in 1189, almost a century before Marco Polo arrived in China. At the time, this part of China was ruled by the Jin dynasty, a state whose rulers were the Jurchen, who were originally a nomadic people whose homeland was in the present-day northeastern provinces.

The bridge took three years to build and, when completed, it made travelling across the Lugou River much faster and easier.

The bridge underwent major refurbishments on a dozen occasions during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912), the last of them in 1787. For the state funeral of the Guangxu Emperor in 1908, all the balustrades were removed to allow the passage of the imperial cortege, but they were put up again afterwards.

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The bridge became infamous in the early 20th century as the site of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, in July 1937, considered by most as marking the official start of the eight-year war between Japan and China.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan was a very different country. It was a fascist, militaristic state bent on building an empire across Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

Japan’s thankfully brief imperial ambitions, informed by its own propaganda that the Japanese were a superior race destined to lead all Asians, were marked by the callous exploitation of resources from its colonies, and an almost barbaric cruelty towards the peoples it defeated and subjugated, a historical fact that many within and outside Japan have forgotten or aren’t even aware of.

Japanese troops in 1937 during the second Sino-Japanese war. Photo: Getty Images

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which involved an allegedly missing Japanese soldier, stoked tensions between Japanese and Chinese troops stationed in the vicinity of the bridge.

The resulting melee marked the start of the Chinese war of resistance against Japanese aggression (also known as the second Sino-Japanese war), which lasted until September 1945, when Japan formally surrendered to the Allies after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August.

The Lugou (or Marco Polo) Bridge underwent major restoration in the mid-1980s, after which it was reopened as a heritage site. In 1995, the bridge was designated by the Beijing municipal government as a “base for patriotic education”.

Today, the beautiful bridge, which has spanned the Lugou River in various forms for over eight centuries, is a popular destination for domestic and foreign tourists.

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