A bridge built with a roof on it

A bridge with a roof is a building before it is a crossing, and the Longjin bridge at Zhijiang is both. Chinese records date its construction to the Ming dynasty, and it lies across the Wushui river — the water that runs past the county town on its way to the Yuan system — holding its covered walkway over a river that rises with the summer rains. The name states the engineering intention plainly: this is a fengyuqiao, a wind and rain bridge, built so that crossing is possible in both, and the type belongs to the Dong people, the minority whose communities run through this corner of Hunan. Zhijiang is formally the Zhijiang Dong Autonomous County, one of several autonomous counties of Huaihua prefecture, and in it the Dong and other minority communities make up more than half the registered population, concentrated toward the south and west. Local writing lists the bridge among the places to experience Dong culture, in the company of drum towers and Dong culture halls — the ordinary furniture of a Dong town. And it stands near a neighbour that records a different migration altogether: the Tianhou Palace on the banks of the Wushui, the largest temple to the sea goddess Mazu this far inland, raised by merchants who came up from the coast and needed their own god at hand.

The roof was not decoration; it was the warranty. A crossing that stays dry in the rain and passable in the wind is one a market town can rely on, and Zhijiang sat where reliability mattered. The county's old honorifics called it the gateway to Yunnan and Guizhou and the throat between Qian and Chu — courtly language for a plain fact: the road southwest ran through here. Under the Ming, the Yuanzhou seat at Zhijiang was the last station of the great Hu Guang highway toward Guizhou and Yunnan, and the empire staffed the town accordingly. In 1548 the grand coordinator Zhang Yue placed his headquarters here while directing the campaigns against the La'ershan Miao, and the governor's office returned in the wars that followed. What travelled the road was trade and administration in both directions — and, in the twentieth century, war. After full-scale war broke out in 1937, the airfield at Zhijiang was urgently expanded into a major base, contemporary accounts calling it the largest airfield of the Far East theatre, and the town filled with barracks, warehouses and the shops that served the Allied units stationed around it. The covered bridge carried foot traffic across the Wushui through all of this while the sky above it filled with aircraft; both belong to its working life.

The bridge's town holds one of modern China's quieter anniversaries. On 15 August 1945 Japan announced unconditional surrender, and on 21 August the delegation representing the Japanese forces in China flew from Nanjing to Zhijiang, where Chinese and Japanese officers met to arrange the details of the handover. The victory memorial and the hall where those meetings happened stand in the county town today, listed among its principal sites together with the bridge itself. The airfield found a second life as Huaihua Zhijiang Airport, the civil field that has served the whole prefecture since 2004, about thirty-one kilometres from the city it is named for. The county's present autonomy is recent in form — the Dong autonomous county was styled in 1986 — and its population of some three hundred thousand keeps a Dong majority belt across the south and west. Through all of this the Longjin bridge spans the Wushui as it has since the Ming: a covered crossing over a republic's victory and an airport's runways, doing what a wind and rain bridge does, which is to let a town keep crossing its river whatever the weather decides. The roof, as ever, is the point.