Luding Bridge is not unfamiliar to many people in their hearts, especially in the "Seven Laws long march" that we learned from childhood, the sentence of dadu bridge crossing the iron cable is even more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, the heroic and fearless image of the Red Army when it flew to seize the Luding Bridge is even more admirable, the Dadu River where the Luding Bridge is located, in fact, it belongs to the largest tributary of the Min River, a tributary of the Yangtze River, due to the rapid flow of water, it has also become a place where geological disasters occur frequently, for us now, crossing this river is naturally not a problem, but when the Red Army spent, The difficulty can be said to be beyond imagination.
However, it is more inconvenient to say that it is more inconvenient to build such a chain bridge on the Dadu River, to know that the Luding Bridge also has a history of more than 300 years, during the Kangxi Period (1706 AD), the masses on both sides of the Dadu River were more inconvenient to come and go, especially if the goods were transported on both sides of the river, either by boat, or by ropeway, of course, the risk of doing so was also very large, after all, people would fall into the water if they were not careful.
After this matter was learned by Kangxi, he decided to build a bridge over the Dadu River, which was ordered from September 1705, knowing that it was only built in April of the following year, and Yue Shenglong, the governor of Sichuan who was responsible for supervising the construction of the bridge. It is even a death order, requiring the craftsmen to engrave their names on the cast iron cables, once which one has a leak, they must be punished, the weight of the entire bridge weighs 40 tons, the iron cables that make up the overall bridge deck alone weigh 21 tons, and they must be erected on both sides of the strait, which will be more difficult.
In particular, how to transport the iron cable to the other side of the fixed, is a big problem, at first people planned to use a sheepskin raft to send to the other side, but after finding that it did not work, and then adopted the way of the rope, after the successful fixing of the iron cable on both sides, in the use of existing stone to fix the iron cable, with pig iron pouring ground pile. The bridge later withstood the test of time, the wind and rain did not invade, knowing that in 1935 the Red Army flew to seize the Luding Bridge to completely make it famous, but with the passage of time, the Luding Bridge itself also had inevitable damage, so in the late 1960s, in order to make this historic bridge shine again, so it was ordered to repair, but there were great problems in the process of restoration.
First of all, in the technology of forging iron chains, due to the use of low-carbon round steel to make iron chains, instead of the original hand-forged wool iron, with blowers instead of traditional hand-pulled bellows, etc., so in theory should not be more solid, but in fact, in the second year, the luding bridge repair chain was broken, to know that the weight of an iron chain weighs 1.6 tons, in the repair process, to pull the chain out of the river, but also to reconnect it.
In the following five years, the chain on the Luding Bridge has been broken several times, although there are no major casualties, but in the process of repair, its difficulty is also greatly unexpected, and this Luding Bridge in the previous 300 years, there was not a single accident, and can not help but feel admiration for the craftsman's forging technology, to this day, the name on the iron cable is still there, they have not only become witnesses of the times, but also become witnesses of history.