# The World's Most Beautiful Bridge Just Opened ![[images/The-Worlds-Most-Beautiful-Bridge-Just-Opened-t0018.webp]] **Creator:** The B1M · **Presenter:** Fred Mills (narrator and host, per theb1m.com) · **Published:** 2026-09-09 · **Length:** 15:16 · [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9w7rYXvmM0) > Caption source: YouTube English (en-GB) manual captions via yt-dlp (default client), first attempt. Chapters from the video description; the written story by Ian Parkin is on [theb1m.com](https://www.theb1m.com/video/the-worlds-most-beautiful-bridge). The Zaha Hadid Architects interviewee is not named in the captions. Paid promotion for CATIA. ## Outline ### 0:00 Grand Opening - **0:01** Taiwan has a new bridge and it's a hit. It does everything a bridge should, but unlike most bridges, "this one is beautiful." - **0:16** With a minimal profile and swooping lines, the **Danjiang Bridge** leaps over the **Tamsui estuary**. It could even become a new national symbol alongside the nearby **Taipei 101**. - **0:30** Not everyone believed this day would come, including the man who built it, who once wrote it off as impossible. - **0:44** It looks effortless, but it may be one of the most challenging construction projects Taiwan has ever undertaken. Two questions: why bother, and how did they make the impossible real? ### 1:04 So What's The Problem Then? - **1:12** The setting: Taiwan, its capital **Taipei**, and the mouth of the **Tamsui River**. - **1:20** On one side is **Bali**, an industrial zone with one of Taiwan's busiest container terminals. On the other is **Tamsui**, a historic district, beloved beauty spot and fast-growing commuter town whose population has **doubled in under 30 years**. - **1:34** Getting from one to the other means a **6 km** detour inland over an existing bridge and back. - **1:45** That bottleneck is shared by the port, the commuter town, and a planned new city of **300,000** people that Taiwan has been trying to build nearby for 30 years. ![[images/The-Worlds-Most-Beautiful-Bridge-Just-Opened-t0220.webp]] - **2:03** A **1 km** stretch is one of the most congested in the city; on a bad day it takes more than half an hour to drive. It's also wearing out the **Guandu Bridge**, built in **1983** and never designed for this traffic. - **2:24** The obvious fix is a new bridge at the river mouth, but it isn't simple: - **2:29** The gap is just under **1 km** wide, not a record but a considerable span. - **2:41** The banks are soft and low-lying. - **2:44** The estuary opens straight onto the **Taiwan Strait**, so it's exposed to huge winds, including yearly **typhoons**. - **2:52** It's an active shipping lane, so the deck must sit high enough for vessels to pass underneath. - **3:04** Tough, but nothing an experienced team of civil engineers can't handle. Except for one last thing. ### 3:08 Just One More Thing - **3:10** The Tamsui river mouth at sunset is one of the most photographed beauty spots in Taiwan. It faces west over the Taiwan Strait, perfectly framing the setting sun. ![[images/The-Worlds-Most-Beautiful-Bridge-Just-Opened-t0335.webp]] - **3:35** It was once counted among the island's **"Eight Views"**. Across East Asia eight is considered lucky or harmonious, and naming a place's eight scenic views is a prestigious tradition; artists and poets have immortalised such spots for centuries. - **4:02** Bridging one of Taiwan's most famous landscapes isn't a decision taken lightly. Anything built there would have to do it justice, a requirement "that couldn't be met with the cold logic of engineering": it had to be **beautiful**. ### 4:31 Enter The Architect - **4:24** So the **Highway Bureau** did something unusual and hired an architect. - **4:33** The ZHA architect recalls the tradition: college students bring partners to watch the sunset, and photographers set up big cameras to shoot it. - **4:48** **Zaha Hadid Architects** has designed some of the most iconic and complex buildings of the past 30 years, and now brought that approach to a bridge. - **5:00** Many teams competed. ZHA says it was the only one to propose **a single tower**, because it analysed the sunset properly and didn't want to disturb the **wetland on the south side**, which a second mast would have destroyed. - **5:30** The bridge had to look as minimal as possible. They chose a **cable-stayed** design because it is very transparent from a distance and the cables "dissolve into the sky"; a **suspension bridge** would have needed thick main cables crossing the view. - **5:58** The result: a single tower offset toward the **eastern bank** so it wouldn't interrupt sunset views, a deck so thin it seems to hover above the water, and cables fanning down "like the fingers of a dancer mid-performance." ![[images/The-Worlds-Most-Beautiful-Bridge-Just-Opened-t0608.webp]] - **6:16** ZHA wanted a dynamic, coherent driving experience. By coincidence, an important **contemporary dance group** is based in Tamsui, and the team translated body movement into the shape of the tower. - **6:56** The tower rises, curves and splits, and the deck gently undulates, all echoing dancers on a stage. Even the **street lighting** rises and falls in a wave, as if choreographed. - **7:19** The catch: architects don't usually design bridges. Bridges are functional, and civil engineers can design them themselves. As the architect puts it, for most infrastructure you just need an engineer to make sure everything connects and nothing falls apart. - **7:45** But the Danjiang Bridge was meant to be a landmark, which allowed architectural flair, and that flair created a whole new kind of complexity in building it. ### 7:56 Things Get Complicated - **8:02** The media complained it was too simple ("Where's the Zaha curve?"), but when the contractor and value engineers looked at it, they said it was too difficult. Every swooping curve and tapering surface had to be justified. - **8:29** The tower starts as **two columns** that meet just above the deck, curves outward, becomes convex as it rises, and splits into a gentle **Y-shape** near the top. - **8:45** A standard engineer would have built a giant concrete column, not for lack of imagination but because it's the most efficient and cost-effective method. ![[images/The-Worlds-Most-Beautiful-Bridge-Just-Opened-t0900.webp]] - **8:59** High-rise cores are built by **slip-forming**: concrete is poured into a mould, sets, the mould is jacked up, and the process repeats. It works best for tall, simple shapes such as a cuboid or cylinder. The Danjiang mast is tall but not simple. - **9:33** A new mould for every section was out of the question, so slip-form specialists **PERI** helped create a mould made of sections that could be repositioned, extended or re-tied, changing shape as the tower rose. - **9:59** But the tower was only the tip of the iceberg. What nearly sank the project was "not the design on the drawing board, but the drawing board itself." - **10:11** Taiwan's infrastructure procurement is still traditional: tenders go out as **2D drawings**, and bidders rebuild the whole project themselves from them, raising accuracy concerns. - **10:26** The project went to tender **eight times**, and on the first seven no contractor would take it. **Liu Yung-ching** of **Kung Sing Engineering**, one of the firms approached, called it "**mission impossible**." - **10:44** Every element was geometrically unique: the twisting tower, deck segments each subtly different from the last, and connections with **millimetre tolerances** across structures hundreds of metres long. Bidders couldn't picture how it all came together. ### 11:17 The Solution? - **11:20** Software came to the rescue (sponsor: **CATIA**). The architect says it suited the project from the start because it handles complex geometry and many components. The team migrated from **CATIA V5 to V6**, moving to the **cloud**, so people in **London**, **Germany** and **Taiwan** worked in one high-precision 3D model. When the German engineers produced drawings, discrepancies could be checked immediately against the model. - **12:16** The team built a complete **1:1 digital twin** of the bridge. Each cable was modelled with its precise geometry, showing how it would hang and interact with loads on the wider structure. ![[images/The-Worlds-Most-Beautiful-Bridge-Just-Opened-t1230.webp]] - **12:37** The model could be taken apart digitally as an assembly: engineers could fly through it, cut a section anywhere, or check for clashes before any steel was fabricated. With geometry changing in three dimensions at once, that detail decided whether it was buildable at all. - **13:03** The government saw the value too. Officials could explore a **3D XML** model on their phones, and the team could do precise quantity take-offs and get to costing quickly. The architect says CATIA changed the way of working for both designer and contractor. - **13:36** Physical drawings were still produced to meet Taiwanese regulations, but CATIA is what made the project properly understood. - **13:48** A contractor was finally found: Liu Yung-ching's **Kung Sing Engineering**, the same man who had called it mission impossible. (The narration says "the seventh tender" here, conflicting with "eight times" at 10:26; the B1M write-up says it was the **eighth** attempt.) ### 13:50 Success - **13:57** The architect, who grew up in Taiwan, says building on home turf feels different, and seeing families use the bridge every day is the most rewarding moment for a designer. ![[images/The-Worlds-Most-Beautiful-Bridge-Just-Opened-t1440.webp]] - **14:22** On **12 May 2026**, after **seven years** of construction, the Danjiang Bridge opened. Road users feel the benefits immediately, but that was only half the job. - **14:36** The view of the Tamsui River has changed permanently, arguably for the better. Thanks to engineer and architect, the bridge "is holding up both sides of the bargain." - **14:50** Sponsor recap (CATIA) and subscribe call. ## Things Mentioned ### Structures & Places - Danjiang Bridge (single-tower cable-stayed bridge over the Tamsui River mouth; opened 12 May 2026 after seven years of construction) - Tamsui River and its estuary, Taiwan Strait - Bali (industrial zone and container terminal) and Tamsui (historic district and commuter town), New Taipei - Guandu Bridge (built 1983; the old 6 km detour crossing) - Planned new city of 300,000 people near Tamsui - Tamsui sunset, one of Taiwan's traditional "Eight Views" - Wetland on the river's south side (protected by the single-mast choice) - Taipei and Taipei 101 ### Design & Engineering Concepts - Cable-stayed versus suspension bridges (thin fanned stay cables versus thick main cables) - Single mast offset toward the eastern bank to keep the western sunset view clear - Thin, "hovering" deck that gently undulates - Tower geometry: two legs merging above the deck, curving out, then splitting into a Y - Wave-patterned street lighting that rises and falls across the deck - Slip-forming, and PERI's reconfigurable mould for a changing cross-section - Value engineering - 2D drawing-based procurement versus 3D models; millimetre tolerances - 1:1 digital twin, clash detection, fly-throughs, sections, quantity take-off and costing - Cloud collaboration across London, Germany and Taiwan; 3D XML viewing on phones ### Organisations - Highway Bureau (Taiwan's highway authority; client) - Zaha Hadid Architects (designer) - Kung Sing Engineering (contractor) - PERI (slip-form and formwork specialist) - German engineering partners (named only as "the German engineers") - A Tamsui-based contemporary dance company (unnamed; the B1M write-up calls it a world-renowned ensemble based in Tamsui, which fits Cloud Gate Dance Theatre) ### Software, Sponsors & Links - CATIA by Dassault Systèmes (paid promotion), including the move from V5 to V6 on the cloud - *Mega Builds*, book by Fred Mills - Full story: theb1m.com/video/the-worlds-most-beautiful-bridge - The World's Best Construction Podcast (The B1M); Get Construction Talking initiative - Footage credits: Focus Taiwan, Zaha Hadid Architects, CNA, Times Now, PERI, 哲睿Jerry, XinXingES ## Bios - **Fred Mills**: Co-founder of The B1M, the world's largest construction-focused video channel, and narrator and host of this video according to theb1m.com. Author of *Mega Builds*, plugged in the description. - **Ian Parkin**: Credited on theb1m.com as the writer of the accompanying article, dated 9 September 2026. - **Zaha Hadid Architects interviewee**: A ZHA architect, shown on a video call, who explains the single-mast, cable-stayed concept, the dance inspiration and the CATIA workflow. He says he grew up in Taiwan. The captions don't name him. - **Liu Yung-ching**: Executive at Taiwanese contractor Kung Sing Engineering. He first called the bridge "mission impossible," then his firm took on the job once the 3D model made it understandable. - **Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA)**: London practice founded by the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid (1950–2016), known for fluid, curving buildings. The Danjiang Bridge is one of its few bridge projects, from a design competition it won in the mid-2010s. - **PERI**: German formwork and scaffolding manufacturer that developed the adjustable slip-form system for the tower. - **Dassault Systèmes / CATIA**: French software company behind CATIA, a 3D design and engineering platform widely used in aerospace and automotive work and here used for the bridge's digital twin.