The 10 Longest Bridges in the World

The longest bridges in the world are almost all high-speed rail viaducts in Asia. China’s Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge leads the ranking at 164.8 km, followed by Taiwan’s Changhua-Kaohsiung Viaduct. Bridge length is measured in several ways, so total structure length, longest main span, and length over water can rank the same bridge very differently.

Most people picture a soaring suspension icon when they think of a record bridge. The reality is longer and lower: a thin ribbon of concrete carrying bullet trains across river deltas and rice fields for a hundred kilometers or more. Before we get to the ranking, it helps to know how engineers decide what “longest” even means, since the answer shapes every list you will read. Length is only one part of the story, and the way a crossing is shaped by both aesthetics and engineering often matters more to the people who use it every day.

What Counts as the Longest Bridge in the World?

There is no single standard for measuring a bridge, which is why rankings disagree. According to the international list of longest bridges, some structures are measured shoreline to shoreline, others from the start of an entrance ramp to the end of an exit ramp, and others by the full length of construction. Four figures come up again and again, and keeping them apart is the key to reading any list correctly.

• Total length: the full continuous span of the structure, including approaches over land and water. This is the number used for the ranking below.
• Main span: the longest unsupported stretch between two towers or piers. This is where suspension bridges dominate.
• Continuous over water: the longest uninterrupted section that sits over a water surface.
• Aggregate over water: the combined length of every section over water, even when land breaks them up.

These distinctions also separate “longest” from other superlatives. The world’s highest bridge, for example, is a completely different record, measured by the drop beneath the deck rather than the distance across. A bridge can top one category and sit far down another, so the biggest bridges in the world by total length are rarely the ones featured on postcards. The same holds for the tallest towers or the longest single span, each its own separate contest with its own winner.

The 10 Longest Bridges in the World

Every bridge below is ranked by total structure length, following the standard used across engineering references. Note how the list is grouped: six of the ten sit in mainland China, most carry trains rather than cars, and the newest entry opened only a few years ago. That mix tells you where large-scale bridge building is happening right now. The ranking rewards sustained scale over single dramatic gaps, which is why names most travelers have never heard sit above world-famous crossings.

Length Comparison of the Top 10

The table gives a quick side-by-side view before the detailed entries:

Two things stand out here. The measurements are not all like for like: the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau figure counts bridge sections only, since its full sea link adds a tunnel and artificial islands. The pattern is also hard to miss. All but three of these crossings carry trains, and China holds six of the ten, a direct result of laying thousands of kilometers of high-speed rail across soft, low-lying ground in a single decade.

1. Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge (China)

At 164.8 km, this viaduct on the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway is the world’s longest bridge, a title Guinness World Records has recognized since 2011. It runs through Jiangsu Province across rice paddies, canals, and lakes, with roughly 9 km carried over the open water of Yangcheng Lake. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, about 10,000 workers built it in four years at a cost near $8.5 billion, and it helped cut Beijing-to-Shanghai travel from 18 hours to under five. Because the alignment follows the nearby Yangtze River, the deck bends through many curves rather than running straight. Most of it sits about 30 meters above the ground, though clearance rises to 150 meters in places so ships can pass beneath. Its scale has turned the bridge into a minor tourist draw in its own right.

2. Changhua-Kaohsiung Viaduct (Taiwan)

Taiwan’s entry stretches 157.3 km as part of the island’s high-speed rail line. Engineers designed it to ride out the earthquakes that regularly shake the region, keeping trains running through seismic events. The viaduct pulled Taipei-to-Kaohsiung travel down to well under two hours and now moves large passenger volumes across a densely built island where open land for new rail is scarce. By 2012 the line had already carried more than 200 million passengers. Beyond the raw numbers, it knits northern and southern Taiwan into one economic zone while keeping the land footprint small, an important trade-off on an island this crowded.

3. Kita-Yaita Viaduct (Japan)

Japan built a 114.4 km viaduct on the Tohoku Shinkansen back in 1982, which is the surprise of this list. Decades before China’s building wave, Japanese engineers were already working at this scale to run bullet trains across the terrain north of Tokyo. Its age is a reminder that mega-viaducts are not a recent invention, even if the very longest ones are. The structure belongs to the wider Shinkansen network linking Tokyo with Aomori in the far north, and it has carried bullet trains reliably for more than four decades.

4. Tianjin Grand Bridge (China)

Another link in the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, the Tianjin Grand Bridge runs 113.7 km and held the Guinness record as the second-longest bridge in the world when it opened in 2010. Three of the top ten sit on this single rail corridor, which shows how much elevated structure a modern high-speed line can require across soft, flood-prone ground.

5. Cangde Grand Bridge (China)

The 105.9 km Cangde Grand Bridge is the third giant on the Beijing-Shanghai route. Building across the low, wet plains between Cangzhou and Dezhou meant lifting the track onto thousands of piers rather than laying it on unstable soil. Elevating the line this way also protects it from flooding and keeps the alignment straight enough for high speeds. Thousands of piers march across the plain between Cangzhou and Dezhou, each one carrying the load down into firmer material below the wet surface soils.

6. Weinan Weihe Grand Bridge (China)

Opened in 2008 on the Zhengzhou-Xi’an line, this 79.7 km bridge was assembled from precast concrete segments cast off site and lifted into place. That method sped up construction and gave engineers tight control over quality. The design also had to handle varied soils and ground movement, with stability the main goal so the track does not settle or shift over time. China Railway Group led the work, running a dedicated casting yard that produced the segments before they were trucked to the alignment and lifted into position.

7. Bang Na Expressway (Thailand)

The 54 km Bang Na Expressway near Bangkok is the odd one out, a six-lane elevated road rather than a railway. Completed in 2000, it held the Guinness record for the longest road bridge and was the longest bridge of any kind in the world until 2004. Most of its length runs over dry city land, with only a short section crossing a river. The six-lane deck is one of the widest long-span roads ever built, floating above the dense sprawl of greater Bangkok for most of its route rather than any bay or open water.

8. Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (China)

This 2018 crossing of the Pearl River Delta is famous as a sea link, and its bridge sections run close to 50 km. It combines long bridge spans with an undersea tunnel and artificial islands, which is why you will often see a larger headline figure for the whole system. It also happens to be the longest sea crossing in the world, covered in more detail further down.

9. Beijing Grand Bridge (China)

Rounding out the Beijing-Shanghai group, the Beijing Grand Bridge adds 48.2 km of elevated high-speed track. On a corridor where large stretches of the route sit on viaducts, structures like this one are less a single landmark and more a continuous elevated railway that happens to be counted as a bridge. Passengers on this stretch can ride for long distances without the track ever touching solid ground.

10. Metro Manila Skyway System (Philippines)

The newest name on the list, the 39.2 km Metro Manila Skyway System opened in 2021 as an elevated expressway threading through one of Asia’s most crowded cities. It is a rare non-rail, non-China entry near the top, and its arrival is a sign that the ranking is still moving. Elevated highways in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and elsewhere are pushing into territory once held almost entirely by Chinese rail viaducts. India joined the trend in 2024 with Atal Setu, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, which opened as the country’s longest sea bridge, and more such projects are under construction across the region. Just behind the Skyway sits the United States’ Lake Pontchartrain Causeway at 38.4 km, which holds its own Guinness record as the longest continuous bridge over water.

The World’s Longest Suspension Bridge: 1915 Canakkale Bridge

Total length is one contest. Main span is another, and it is the one that produces the dramatic single-leap structures most people admire. The longest suspension bridge in the world is Turkey’s 1915 Canakkale Bridge, which opened across the Dardanelles Strait in March 2022 with a main span of 2,023 meters. That span, verified in the engineering record on Structurae, beat Japan’s Akashi Kaikyo Bridge by 32 meters to take the record. Suspension bridges hold the span title for a simple reason: their cable systems carry the longest unsupported distances of any bridge type. Designed by the consulting group COWI and built by a Turkish and South Korean consortium for around $2.5 billion, it went up in roughly five years. The site sits in a zone prone to high winds and earthquakes, so the deck uses a twin-box girder shaped for aerodynamic stability, and the crossing links Gelibolu on the European side with Lapseki on the Asian side.

The type has a long history at the top. Generations of record holders, from the Brooklyn Bridge onward, pushed the limits of steel-cable spans. That story of steadily longer crossings runs right through the evolution of construction techniques, each new record made possible by stronger materials and better analysis. The Canakkale bridge is the current end point of that line, cutting a strait crossing that once took an hour by ferry down to about six minutes by car.

What Is the Longest Sea Bridge in the World?

The longest sea bridge in the world is the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, which opened in 2018 across the mouth of the Pearl River Delta. It ties together three cities, Hong Kong, Zhuhai, and Macau, that sit at the corners of one of China’s busiest economic regions. You will often see it listed at about 55 km. That headline figure covers the full link, including an undersea tunnel of roughly 6.7 km and the approach roads. Counted as bridge alone, it runs close to 50 km, which is where it sits on the length ranking above. Roughly 400,000 tonnes of steel went into the structure, and its sweeping curve across the water has been likened to a Chinese dragon.

Building across open sea brought problems that dry-land viaducts never face, from shipping lanes that had to stay open to salt water, typhoons, and busy air traffic near Hong Kong. The engineers answered with a mix of high bridge spans for most of the route and a tunnel where ships and planes needed clear passage. That tunnel keeps a major shipping channel and the flight path into Hong Kong’s airport open, which is one reason a single continuous bridge was never on the table. Sea crossings like this are also becoming attractions in their own right, part of a wider trend where travel and architecture pull people toward the structures themselves, not just the places they connect.

The Bigger Picture

Read these ten together and a pattern appears: the longest bridges in the world are less about spanning a single dramatic gap and more about carrying fast trains across whole regions of soft, wet, low-lying land. Length records now belong to infrastructure planners as much as to bridge designers, and the next entries will likely come from elevated highways in fast-growing economies rather than from a new engineering marvel over water. What stays constant is the human reason behind every one, the same reason that makes bridges more than structures: they hand back time, shorten distance, and quietly redraw the map of who can reach what.