Four Ways Across the Lancang at Liutongjiang

Liutongjiang lies beside the Lancang River in Foshan Township, Deqin County. A 2013 report by Shangri-La Online traced the Tea-Horse Road route from Adunzi, the old county seat: travellers crossed a 22-kilometre mountain stretch over Zagongka, reached the settlements near the river and then crossed toward Liutongjiang. The crossing was a narrow hinge in a much longer journey through steep terrain.

Before bridges, villagers used a bamboo-strip cable. A traveller or load was secured to a sliding wooden piece and moved along the line by hand and momentum. The local account described the river as dangerous during heavy rain and recorded repeated replacement of worn bamboo cables. Crossing depended on maintaining the line and knowing how to use it; the river corridor was both a route and a daily piece of skilled work.

A 2021 Shangri-La Online feature reports that Lijiang merchant Lai Yaocai and Zhongdian Tibetan community leader Ma Zhucai supported the construction of the Pudu Bridge in 1948. Craftsmen built it mainly from iron chains and wooden planks. The bridge made the crossing more dependable for trade and local travel, though it remained a suspended structure above a fast river.

In 1966, local people built a simpler steel-cable and wooden-plank bridge beside it with government support, according to the same report. The two structures mark successive choices about materials and access: an engineered chain bridge, followed by a lighter community-built suspension bridge. The report also describes an older resident, Lu Rong, as one of the few villagers who still knew how to weave bamboo ferry cables. The skill connected the new bridges to the knowledge they had begun to replace.

The 2021 report counted four kinds of crossing within roughly 800 metres: bamboo cable, a simple chain bridge, the steel-cable footbridge and a modern two-lane road bridge. It presents them as a local record of changing mobility. Each new structure shortened the time and risk involved in crossing, while also changing the work available to people who once made and maintained the cables.