History
The first construction of the bridge dates back to the year 816 AD, during the mid Tang Dynasty. According to written accounts, the bridge derives its name from the local prefect Wang Zhongshu, who in a selfless act had sold his precious belt in order to help finance its construction. Since then, it has been reconstructed several times. The current structure of the Precious Belt Bridge is a Ming Dynasty era reconstruction of 1446 AD, during the reign of the Zhengtong Emperor.
John Barrow, while attached to the British Macartney Embassy in 1793, visited the Precious Belt Bridge during the diplomatic mission to China. He accurately described the bridge's length and the central arches being of greater height than the rest.
The bridge was included on the list of national monuments (resolution 5-285) in 2001.
Read more about this topic: Precious Belt Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)