Kintaikyo Bridge

Kintaikyo is a wooden bridge over the Nishiki River in Iwakuni. It has five spans, the middle three of them arches, and has been rebuilt in the same form since the seventeenth century. It has been a Place of Scenic Beauty, a national designation, since 1922.

History

The castle town of Iwakuni was split by the Nishiki River, about 200 metres wide at that point, with the domain offices and the senior samurai on one bank and the rest of the town on the other. Bridges were built there from the founding of the town, but the river ran fast over deep gravel and they washed away again and again.

The third lord of Iwakuni, Kikkawa Hiroyoshi, set out to build one that would not, but the river was too wide for a single arch. The answer came from a Chinese book of views of West Lake at Hangzhou, brought to him by Dokuryu, a Ming monk and physician who was treating him. An illustration showed small arched bridges running between five islands, and Hiroyoshi saw that piers built like islands would let him cross in several arches instead of one.

The bridge was finished in 1673 and washed away the next year. Rebuilt with improvements, it then stood for 276 years, kept up by more than a hundred repairs and replacements. A typhoon carried it away in 1950. There were calls to replace it with concrete, but the town pressed for the old form, and a wooden bridge was finished in 1953, with concrete foundations under the stone piers and its height raised by a metre. The wooden parts were replaced again between 2001 and 2004. Iwakuni has since put the bridge and the layout of the old castle town forward for the World Heritage tentative list.

The structure

Five wooden bridges stand in a row. The middle three are arches, built up from stacked timbers rather than a frame, and the two at the ends are girder bridges with a curve. The combination is very rare. The carpentry is handed down through the carpenters who carry out each rebuilding, so the joinery of the Edo period is still in use.