The Yongtong Bridge, also called Small Stone Bridge, lies across the Qingshui River to the west of Zhaoxian County, Hebei Province.
The Yongtong Bridge is very similar to the famous Anji Bridge (Big Stone Bridge), except that it is smaller than the latter. It was first built during the Mingchang reign (1190-1195) in the Jin Dynasty. Legend has it that Lu Ban built the Anji Bridge (Big Stone Bridge), while his younger sister Lu Jiang built the smaller one. At that time, the brother and the sister competed with each other in building a bridge over one night. Lu Jiang was not as skilled as her brother, and therefore she built the small bridge after the big one. When the daybreak was coming, she had not finished it. A deity happened to be passing there and secretly helped the sister. As a result, the sister won the competition for her bridge was more exquisite than her brother's. Though it was only a fairy tale, it came out with the respective characteristics of the two bridges and the relationship between them.
The Yongtong Bridge, with an open spandrel, consists of 21 arch stones arrayed lengthways. The span of it is about 26 meters and the width of each arch is about 5.2 meters. The bridge is 6.3 meters wide. There are four open arches on the big spandrel. On the bridge are 22 foursquare roofing poles. On the body of the bridge and the balustrades there are many beautiful and vivid carvings in relief such as River Spirits, flying horses, swimming fish and so on, which were mostly carved in the second year (1507) of the Zhengde reign in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). During the past dynasties, many scholars left a lot of inscriptions here inspired by the beauty and elegance of the bridge.
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