The Only Bridge in Vietnam That Steps Aside

Around eleven at night on Saturday and Sunday, the cars are stopped and something strange happens on the Han River Bridge. The whole middle section of the bridge begins to rotate. It swings ninety degrees until it lies flat along the river, pointing the same way the water flows. The turn takes about fifteen minutes. A boat slips through the open gap, and then the bridge swings back into place.

This is the first swing bridge in Vietnam, and it is still the only one. Vietnamese engineers and workers designed it and built it themselves, without a foreign firm doing the hard part. The middle turns on a round steel base set into a pier standing in the water.

It opened on March 29, 2000. That date is not random. It is the day Da Nang marks the end of the war in the city, 25 years after 1975. Work on the bridge had started on September 2, 1998, the country's National Day. The bridge runs 487.7 metres across the river and is 12.9 metres wide.

The most surprising part is who paid for it. The bridge cost about 95 billion dong. More than 7 billion of that came from ordinary people and local businesses in Da Nang, who gave their own money so the bridge could be built. It was a huge amount at the time.

Everyone who gave more than 10 million dong had their name carved onto a plaque set by the bridge on Bach Dang Street. The largest single gift, 45 million dong, came from Nguyen Ba Thanh, the head of the city at the time. Near his name are much smaller ones. One fisherman gave 200,000 dong.

So come on a Saturday night, stand on the riverbank near Bach Dang Street, and wait for eleven o'clock. Watch a bridge that a whole city helped pay for turn slowly to let one boat through, then swing back before morning. It is the only bridge in the country that will ever do that for you.