Many people will have questions about Luoyang Bridge. How can this be a cross-sea bridge, and Luoyang is not near the sea? In fact, many people have been misunderstood by the name Luoyang Bridge. Luoyang Bridge is not in Luoyang, but on the Luoyang River in the northeast of Quanzhou, Fujian. Quanzhou has been a Hakka gathering place since ancient times. Probably in the early years of the Tang Dynasty, there were frequent wars in the Central Plains, and a large number of Central Plains people in Luoshui and Heshui areas of Henan moved to Quanzhou. These people saw that Quanzhou's landscape was very similar to Luoyang and missed their homeland, so they named it Luoyang. Later, the descendants of these people built a bridge on the local Luoyang River, named Luoyang Bridge.
Luoyang Bridge is the first large-scale stone bridge across the sea in China, which was built at 1053 and took six years and eight months to complete. The bridge is about1200m long and 5m wide. It has 46 docks, 500 handrails, stone lions, stone pavilions, stone pagodas and warrior statues. It's very large. Now there are only 3 1 piers left in the stone bridge, and the length is 1 188 meters.
Luoyang bridge is located at the intersection of rivers and seas. The river is wide and deep, and the wind and waves are fierce. This project is extremely arduous. Luoyang Bridge won the title of bridge history mainly because of its unique design and the bold "innovation" of builders.
First, Luoyang Bridge pioneered the method of "mat foundation" to build piers. At that time, craftsmen paved the middle line of the bridge with big stones at the bottom of the river and built an underwater long dike with a width of more than 20 meters and a length of two miles. Then, the pier was built on the stone embankment with stone strips. This technology was not adopted by Europeans until the19th century.
Second, craftsmen use "biotechnology" to strengthen bridges according to local conditions. There is a mollusk with a shell on the local seabed, named oyster. Oysters have two shells. A shell is attached to a rocky reef or another oyster, and they are intertwined. Another shell covers your soft body. Oysters are very fertile and pervasive. Once mixed with stone glue, they can't be shoveled down with a shovel. Craftsmen use this characteristic of oysters to plant oysters on the bridge foundation to connect cemented stones. Sure enough, within a few years, oysters connected the scattered stones into a whole and glued the scattered stones together. The foundation of Luoyang Bridge lasted for more than 900 years, but it didn't collapse, and oysters contributed a lot. This method of strengthening bridges by biology is unique at all times and in all countries.
Third, craftsmen build bridges by floating. Friends who have been to Luoyang Bridge know that every stone slab on Luoyang Bridge is 10 meters long, thick and large, and weighs about twenty or thirty tons. How did the ancients transport these stones to the dock? Craftsmen skillfully used the fluctuation law of tides and the buoyancy of seawater. At high tide, they used rafts to transport stones to the dock, and used the buoyancy of high tide to put them on the dock. More than 300 stone slabs and tens of thousands of stones on Luoyang Bridge were erected in this way.
Luoyang Bridge's unique design and innovative bridge-building technology have condensed the superb wisdom of the ancients and created a legend in the history of Chinese bridges. At the same time, this is also an important reason why this bridge still stands after more than a thousand years.