Barun Roy: A new bridge game

ASIA FILE

A 36-km cable-stayed structure across Hangzhou Bay in China will be the world's longest sea-crossing bridge.

There was a time when a small bridge in Thailand, on the River Kwai, was the most famous bridge in Asia, though for all the wrong reasons, thanks to David Lean's 1957 movie of the same name. It had been ordered built in 1942 by the Japanese occupation forces for a railway linking Thailand and Myanmar (then Burma) and thousands of prisoners of war perished on the job, starved and tortured by their Japanese masters. Today, the bridge exists as a curiosity, and a train takes visitors daily on a free ride from Kanchanaburi to Nam Tok, offering a nostalgic peep into history.

Ten years ago, another Japanese-built bridge, the Akashi Kaikyo, across the Akashi Straits between Japan's Honshu and Shikoku islands, came to be Asia's best known, as well as the world's, being the only suspension bridge with the longest main span "" 1,991 metres between its two supporting towers.

Today, the honour belongs to China, where a 36-km cable-stayed structure across Hangzhou Bay, in Zhejiang province, will open to traffic next month as the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world. It links Shanghai with Ningbo, a burgeoning industrial city on the South China Sea, reducing the distance between the two from 250 miles to just 50.

And with it, the Asian bridge story opens an entirely different chapter, where no gap is considered wide enough any more. As architects are aiming higher and higher into the sky, bridge-builders have begun to stretch longer and longer across physical distance, helping redraw the economic landscapes of nations the way highways and expressways do.

In fact, the new sea crossing is the second across Hangzhou Bay. The first, 31 km long on the eastern edge of the bay, was opened in November 2005 to link the small Shanghai town of Lucaogang with Yangshan Island, where China is building its biggest deepwater seaport. Within the next two years, at least two more long-distance Chinese bridges will cross the seas "" the Qingdao Bay Bridge (35.4 km) to Huang Island and the Zhoushan Island Bridge (27 km) across the South China Sea to the Zhoushan archipelago, further integrating it with the mainland.

Down the road, there will be a 19-km link (a 10-km suspension bridge plus a 9-km tunnel) between Shanghai and the island of Chongming, which is being aggressively developed as a residential and leisure outpost. Also planned is a bridge across Bohai Bay, one of China's three major urban belts along with the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas.

Behind all this activity is a desire to integrate all three urban belts into one seamless economic corridor. Adding a new dimension to the whole idea, Guangdong has reached an agreement with Hong Kong and Macau to fund a $5.9 billion cross-sea bridge linking them with Zhuhai in the Pearl Delta

Though not as long as any of the Chinese super bridges, South Korea's 12.3-km, $1.4 billion bridge across the Yellow Sea, under construction, linking Seoul with Incheon International Airport on Yongjing Island, will be a celebrity in its own right. Malaysia is building a second bridge to Penang, 24 km long (almost double the length of the first), of which 17 km will be across the sea. India has just handed out the bid (to Reliance Energy Ltd) for its first sea-crossing bridge "" the Pamban bridge is too old and small to count "" that could become a reality in the next five years. The 22.5 km road and railway link, likely to cost upward of $1 billion, will connect Sewree on Mumbai Island with Nhava Sheva in Navi Mumbai across the harbour, Mumbai's new economic growth centre.

Into the future, there's talk of a 26 km suspension bridge across the Sunda Strait in Indonesia to link the islands of Java and Sumatra. The government has approved the project, and if completed "" in the Indonesian context that's a big 'if' "" it's destined to be the longest suspension bridge in the world with a main span of about 3,000 metres. Thailand, encouraged by its mega bridges across the Chao Phraya River that have brought about massive improvements in Bangkok's once notorious traffic situation, is said to be mulling a 47-km passage across the Gulf of Thailand to ease it up even further.

Crazy? But that's the way Asia is headed. One of these days, even that old Japanese dream of linking up Japan and Korea through a 200-km series of bridges and undersea tunnels might become a reality. The idea is to have bridge links from Karatsu, on Kyushu Island, to Iki Island, from where a 60-km tunnel is to lead to Tsushim Island and a 68-km tunnel from Tsushim to Busan on the Korean peninsula. Both tunnels would beat the world record currently held by the 53.9-km undersea bridge between Honshu and Hokkaido Islands.