A ceremony for laying the foundation stone of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge was held on June 8 in Cixi of the city of Ningbo in east of China’s Zhejiang Province.

The 36-km-long bridge, from Haiyan in the north to Cixi in the south, will be the longest cross-sea bridge in the world. When completed, it will shorten the land distance between Ningbo and Shanghai by over 120 km.

The project, to be completed in 2008, involves 11.8 billion yuan (equivalent to US$ 1.42 billion) in total investment. All the capital will be raised by enterprises in Zhejiang Province, with 50.25 percent coming from private business.

According to Wang Yong, chief director of the project, construction of the bridge, on the basis of a decade of design and feasibility studies, has created many precedents. It will be China’s first digital bridge, equipped with a central monitoring system, with a pair of monitors installed at every 1-km section.

A 10,000-square-meter platform, which is 14 km from the southern bank, has been built in the sea. The first of its kind in China, it is currently the project’s construction base and will serve as a rescue facility for sea transportation service and a tourist attraction after the bridge is completed.

The design of the bridge presents novel features. The planners have integrated engineering and scenery by borrowing the aesthetics of Sudi Dike on the West Lake in Hangzhou and taking into account the complicated hydrological environment at Hangzhou Bay. Shaped like the letter S, the bridge follows graceful, natural lines. With arched openings for navigation, the bridge presents a scalloped side-view.

To relieve doubts that the bridge might block the spectacular Qiantang River bores, hydrologists, using advanced equipment, have made careful studies of the river’s flow and the tides, as well as the terrain of the seabed in Hangzhou Bay. They found that the bores begin at Gaoyangshan, which is more than 30 km upstream from the bridge. This proves that the bridge will not stem the turbulent bores, which provide a rare scene of worldwide wonder and a popular tourist attraction.

Upon completion, the bridge is expected to expedite economic integration of the Yangtze River Delta and turn Ningbo into a central city on the delta’s southern border. With its resources and the potential of its harbor economy fully tapped, Ningbo, the largest port in China, will become a major component of the Shanghai international navigation center, and its status as a seagoing container hub of the Northeast Asian navigation center will be reinforced.

To facilitate the Ningbo-Shanghai-Hangzhou through communication, the bridge is expected to spur the development of the Hangzhou Bay rim industrial belt. It will link up existing development zones and industrial parks of various types to form three large coastal, bayside and roadside and roadside industrial belts.

According to experts, China’s bridge construction has reached advanced world levels. The Hangzhou Bay Bridge will become a model for the building of other cross-sea bridges in China. Plans for a number of cross-sea bridges, such as the Bohai Bay Bridge, Huangdao Island Bridge, East China Sea Bridge and Zhoushan Island Bridge, have already been placed on the agenda. Combined investment in these projects will exceed 100 billion yuan.