On a drizzly spring morning in Tongdao Dong autonomous county, tucked into the misty borderlands where Hunan province meets the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and Guizhou province, villagers move in a quiet procession. With woven baskets strapped to their backs, they cross wooden covered bridges built by their ancestors and head uphill to pick the season's first tea leaves.
These structures are more than mere crossings over water. In the villages of the Dong ethnic group, they function as shelters, gathering places, and, in a sense, spiritual anchors. Locals call them "wind-and-rain bridges", for their ability to shield travelers from the elements. Some refer to them as "fortune bridges", believed to gather and bestow blessings.
China's recorded history of such bridges dates to the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), though the term "Chinese covered bridge" was only formally defined in the mid-20th century by architectural scholars. Today, there are 2,193 documented covered bridges, according to the conclusion of a recent three-year national covered bridge preservation initiative.
Tongdao, in Huaihua, Hunan, alone accounts for 117, nine of which are nationally protected cultural relics. Each week, one man makes a circuit to check on them.
"They're like old friends," says Yang Huixiang, a member of Tongdao county government's cultural relics unit, who has spent two decades researching and safeguarding the bridges."Some are 100 to 200 years old."
Yang grew up in a Dong village where these bridges were part of daily life. He remembers elders chatting under their roofs, children playing overhead, and others swimming in the rivers below. When he began work in 2003, his first assignment was deceptively simple: to draw the bridges he knew so well.
"I didn't even know where to start," he says. Trained in law rather than architecture, he struggled to translate lived familiarity into precise technical drawings. At the time, documentation relied heavily on manual measuring and hand sketching. To record details accurately, Yang sometimes climbed onto beams with a tape measure.
Reaching the bridges could be just as arduous. In mountainous terrain with limited road access, he and his colleagues often traveled by bicycle, pushing uphill when paths became too steep. "If you didn't love it, you couldn't keep going," he adds.
His favorite remains Puji Bridge, a roughly 30-meter-long structure built in 1760 during the Qianlong era of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Constructed entirely of stone and timber, it contains not a single iron nail — an example of the Dong people's mastery of mortise-and-tenon joinery.
Its gray stone slabs, white-painted body, and darkened wooden beams lend it a quiet elegance. Beneath it, a river flows gently; nearby, fields of rapeseed flowers bloom each spring. At one end stand an ancient well and a temple dedicated to the God of Earth.
"It blends perfectly with the village, doesn't it?" Yang asks. He notes that during the recent national preservation initiative, no sweeping restorations were carried out. Instead, the focus remained on routine upkeep and fire prevention.
He attributes this in part to the resilience of traditional timber construction techniques, as well as the deliberate siting of bridges over relatively calm waters.
Long before formal preservation policies were put in place, he adds, local villagers took responsibility for upkeep — pooling funds, materials and labor, and commissioning nearby carpenters for repairs when needed.
While sifting through historical records in Tongdao, Yang came across a striking account from the 1970s: another nationally treasured covered bridge, Huilong Bridge, had been torn apart by a flood.
Entire sections of the bridge were swept downstream, but villagers salvaged the scattered timbers and returned them upstream. "It must have taken the effort of the whole village," Yang says.
Yang Shengchun remembers that flood vividly. He was about 10 when his grandfather helped rebuild Huilong Bridge. "My grandfather always said it was a pity."
