A 295-metre highway bridge over the Honghe River on the China-Vietnam border has opened for trial operations.
Linking southwest China's Yunnan province and Lao Cai in Vietnam, the bridge crosses the Honghe River at Hekou as it flows through Vietnam to the Gulf of Tonkin at Haiphong.
The map below shows the Gulf of Tonkin:
The new bridge connects highways to the Yunnan provincial capital of Kunming and the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and will cut the travel time between the two cities from 17 hours to 13 hours.
The 21.5-metre wide bridge is needed to facilitate growing cross-border trade and will ease pressure on the increasingly congested existing highway and rail bridges, a Hekou official told Xinhua.
The agreement calls for China and Vietnam to share the US$9.42 million construction cost with Beijing, agreeing to pay US$5.75 million of the total.
Tracey Jia
