Taroko Gate Bridge Audio Guide

Taroko Bridge: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Taroko Bridge

   Welcome to Taroko Bridge, known locally as 太魯閣大橋. It carries Provincial Highway 9 across the Liwu River on Taiwan's east coast, and it also marks the start of a county road called Hualien Route 2. On one side lies Xincheng Township, and on the other Xiulin Township, both in Hualien County. Highway 9 is the Suhua Highway, so anyone driving between Yilan and Hualien ends up crossing this bridge. It is not a detour or an optional sightseeing stop. It is the way through. The bridge is a fairly young landmark. It opened in 2002, and the stories attached to it are about modern engineering and about how a community decided what a bridge should look like. Over the next few minutes we will look at why it was built, how its steel arches are designed, and why locals voted on whether to paint it.

2. 02

   Taroko Bridge and the Traffic Knot It Untied

   Before this bridge existed, the Suhua Highway had a problem at the mouth of Taroko Gorge. Highway 9 had to wind around to reach Jinwen Bridge, which was the only Suhua Highway crossing of the Liwu River. Right beside it, the Central Cross-Island Highway, Highway 8, flowed into the same spot at the Taroko entrance. Two streams of traffic met at one narrow point, and the result was a bottleneck. The solution was to straighten the road. Engineers cut a new line of about 2.4 kilometers, running from Shangchongde in Chongde Village in Xiulin Township in the north to near Xintian in Xincheng Village in the south, close to the Asia Cement Hualien plant. The project cost more than 740 million New Taiwan dollars and was won in competitive bidding by the Veterans Engineering Company. Work began in February 1999, and the bridge opened to traffic on the third of July, 2002. The old road did not vanish. Jinwen Bridge and the old road toward the gorge are still there. The Suhua Highway simply no longer runs through that crowded junction.

3. 03

   Taroko Bridge: Steel Arches by Day, Light by Night

   Now look at the structure itself. Taroko Bridge is a simply supported Nielsen steel arch bridge with five spans. In plain terms, each span rests on its own supports, and steel arches rise above the deck to carry the load. The whole bridge is about 1,208 meters long, although news reports give 1,248 meters. The main bridge section alone is 510 meters, and the deck is 26.6 meters wide, which is generous room for a national highway. Its color is a pale blue touched with grey-white, sometimes described as light blue or water blue. Against the mountains and the river valley, it was chosen to sit quietly in the landscape rather than shout at it. After dark the bridge gets a second personality. One hundred and two lamps project light onto it, and that nightly glow has helped turn it into an attraction in Hualien County.

4. 04

   Taroko Bridge and the Great Color Vote

   Here is a small piece of local democracy. Since the day it opened, the bridge has kept its original color. Some residents of Xiulin Township began to ask whether a plain pale blue really reflected the character of the area. So the Directorate General of Highways held a public vote. From August to December of 2010, people could choose among five painted designs, each with its own pattern and colors, or keep the bridge as it was. The result came in January of 2011, and keeping the original color won with 1,855 votes, the highest total. That original color had its own backstory. It was settled in October of 1999, when scholars from various organizations surveyed the site and discussed the options. They concluded that this soft shade would blend into the surrounding environment best. Ten years later, the public agreed with them.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   The bridge does not stand alone. Close by, at the southern end of Jinwen Bridge, stands the Taroko Gate memorial archway, built for the Central Cross-Island Highway, which opened on the ninth of May, 1960. It has three bays and four vermilion columns, a roof of golden glazed tiles, and double dragons chasing a pearl painted on its beams. It was registered as a historic building on the twenty-ninth of March, 2005. On the rock face beside the road, four characters read Lu Ge Chang Chun, which means something like Eternal Spring at Taroko. It makes a nice pairing. One structure marks a highway from 1960, the other a highway shortcut from 2002. Next time you cross, think about the road that used to bend around the old junction, and about the traffic that this long blue span now carries straight past it. What else changed about the way people reach the gorge once the road was straightened?