The forgotten bridge : recovering the heritage significance of the friendship bridge of Xiaoshan District, Tangshan City

Abstract

In Chinese cities, many contemporary buildings with functional attributes are overlooked and considered to have no significant conservation value due to a lack of awareness of their potential heritage significance. The “Friendship Bridge” (友誼橋 or Youyi Qiao in the Pinyin Romanization) in the Xiaoshan neighbourhood is a typical example." Xiaoshan is an area that lies to the south of Tangshan and is a remnant of the Yanshan Mountains. At the end of the Qing dynasty the Qing government built the first railway in China, the Tangxu Road, and the Xiaoshan Flyover is located at the end of the Tangxu Railway. The bridge was built over the railway to connect the two sides of the railway for easy access. Once the most prosperous landmark in the centre of Tangshan, it was comparable to the 'Great World' shopping mall in Shanghai in the 19th century. But it was destroyed in one of the most significant events in Tangshan's recent history - the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake. The earthquake destroyed much of the city, killing nearly 250,000 people. The surviving underground passageway is a reconstruction project that the government woke up to after the disaster. In the underpass there is a huge mural depicting the area before the earthquake. This has become an important landmark capturing the collective memory of the city before the earthquake. However, the question posed in this dissertation is: if the Friendship Bridge is an iconic symbol of the city's post-earthquake reconstruction, then why has it been neglected? And this is what this research is about.