China's rugged Yungui Plateau hosts the highest bridge in the world
In southwest China, the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau is a maze of karst peaks and gorges so hard to cross that engineers have thrown the world's highest bridge over it. It splits Asia's great rivers, yet Guizhou and Yunnan rank among China's three poorest provinces on the Human Development Index.
The Yungui Plateau sprawls mainly across Yunnan and Guizhou and wears two faces. Its southwestern half is genuinely tableland, with gentler high ground, while the northeast crumples into rolling hills, ravines and karst. Taken strictly, it runs from the Red River Fault in Yunnan to Hunan's Wuling Mountains, covering most of eastern Yunnan and most of Guizhou; looser usage stretches the label over neighbouring slices of Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi, even where the land is not flat at all.
Mountains frame it on almost every side. The Hengduan range props it up to the northwest, the Wumeng Mountains and Wulian Feng wall off the north-centre along the Jinsha, or upper Yangtze, and the Dalou Mountains mark the edge of the Sichuan Basin. In the south the Miao Range descends toward the karst hills of South China, and beyond the Red River the Ailao Mountains close the southwest.
Rivers born in eastern Tibet part company here: the Salween and Mekong continue south while the Yangtze swings northeast. The Nanpan and Beipan, both headwaters of the Pearl River, drain most of the west, and the Wu, a Yangtze tributary, drains much of the east. Large lakes such as Dian Chi and Fuxian lie in the Yunnan section, with Erhai on the western rim beneath the Hengduan. Conditions shift from semi-arid pockets in east-central Yunnan to humid subtropical weather over most of Guizhou, and subtropical evergreen forest gives way to mixed broadleaf woods.
Long regarded as a backwater separating the Sichuan Basin from South China, the plateau has been home to many minority peoples farming terraced hillsides and valleys, and plenty still live in traditional rural villages. Kunming, Guiyang and Zunyi are its main cities. Railways and expressways now slice through the terrain, and the Beipanjiang Bridge on the Yunnan–Guizhou border stands higher above its gorge than any other bridge.
Source: Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau
