The Pinglu Canal opened to navigation this month. It runs 134.2 kilometres from the Xijin reservoir on the Yu River to the Qin River and the Beibu Gulf, and gives inland Guangxi a shipping route to the sea. The route cuts through forested hills. On both banks live small carnivores, squirrels and birds whose range once ran unbroken along the valley. Without a crossing, the canal would have cut that range in half.
There are 27 bridges along the canal. This is the only one built for animals alone. Its 20-metre deck has no asphalt. The builders spread between 0.6 and 1.2 metres of planting soil over it and laid stones that match the surrounding slopes. Then they planted the same vegetation that grows on the nearby hills: Chinese banyan, ring-cupped oak and fruit trees the animals can feed on.
The design starts from how the animals behave. A spotted linsang, a slender, secretive tree-dweller, will not cross open ground it does not trust. A masked palm civet or an Asian leopard cat moves by scent and cover. So the bridge had to smell and look like the ground they already know, and be something they would not recognise as human-made. The rock piles give shade and places to hide. The water pits hold rain for dry days.
Everything else about the canal is on a heavy industrial scale. Building it cost around 72.7 billion yuan and meant excavating 339 million cubic metres of earth. The Madao locks lift ships 30 metres. One motorway bridge carrying more than 100,000 vehicles a day was lifted into its new position in sixteen hours. Next to all that, a strip of oak and banyan across the water is a small thing. It was also planned from the start, not added once the damage was already done.
This follows a wider change in how China plans large infrastructure: wildlife passages are drawn into the design at the beginning, not added decades later. Along the Pinglu, the same thinking shows in artificial fish nests, bird perches and restored wetlands in the 36 conservation zones.
Whether the linsangs come is now up to them. The trees need time to root, and the scent of the builders needs time to fade. The engineers have done their part. They made a crossing that asks nothing of the animals except that they walk across what looks like home.