It's one of the most audacious projects ever undertaken: linking the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Zhongshan by spanning the Pearl River estuary with a 24-kilometre artificial sea crossing, comprising bridges, artificial islands and a 6.8 kilometre underwater tunnel.
The construction of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan bridge-tunnel is an engineering challenge that pushes all the known limits in this field. Begun in May 2017 and completed in June 2024, this massive project has given the Great Bay region, with an estimated population of 80 million, an eight-lane highway that has reduced the time it takes to cross the delta from two hours to around 30 minutes.
Here, the Chinese have invested the equivalent of 6 billion US dollars to continue and intensify the development of a region with an annual economic output of 1,960 billion dollars in 2023, equivalent to the GDP of a country like Italy.
The exponential prosperity of this part of the world made it possible to envisage and achieve the impossible in terms of megastructure architecture and engineering. More than 15,000 workers and 7 years of construction work were required to create this new direct link between the two sides of the Pearl River delta, a major asset for an already extraordinary network comprising 4,900 kilometres of motorway, 2,500 kilometres of railway, four river and sea bridges, five international airports and three commercial ports ranked among the ten largest in the world.
Unconventional and unprecedented designs, a quest for performance and strength, perilous transport and assembly conditions in hostile environments… the construction of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan bridge-tunnel has proved the skill of its builders and broken one world record after another in this sector.
How did the Chinese and international engineers make this miracle possible? What challenges did they have to overcome to enable 100,000 vehicles a day to safely cross an estuary more than 20 kilometres wide? What technological innovations came out of this project, and how will it mark the history of bridge engineering worldwide? Which stages were the most challenging, and how did the workers constantly push back the limits to bring such a structure to fruition?
With the help of leading experts from around the world and a narrative enriched by particularly informative three-dimensional models, our 52-minute documentary answers these questions, telling the unique and spectacular story of this mega construction site, which is shaping the landscape and bright future of the Great Bay region and taking the construction of maritime links into a new era.
