Many writers have been astonished by another Chinese bridge, called the Bridge of Cho-gan, in the province of Shen-si. Its great arch is said to have had an unrivalled span. I am told that it was built with huge blocks of stone, cut into voussoirs, the joints of which converged towards a common centre, as in our own bridges. This may be true, though in photographs of Chinese bridges which I have seen the voussoirs do not resemble ours; not only are they much longer, they are much narrower also, and recall to my memory a good description written by Barrow, whose impressions of China are invaluable to students. Barrow speaks of archstones from five to ten feet long, and says that each stone “is cut so as to form a segment of the arch.” “There is no keystone” when an arch is built in this manner. Again, “ribs of wood fitted to the convexity of the arch are bolted through the stones by iron bars, fixed in the solid part of the bridge”; sometimes no wood is employed, and then “the curved stones are mortised into long transverse blocks of stone.” It would be ridiculous to speak of this technical method as one that employs voussoirs, since the arch ring is built with a few segmental stones and without a keystone; and possibly the Bridge of Cho-gan was constructed in this fashion. A drawing of it is given in Kircher’s “La Chine Illustrée”--or, rather, in Dalquié’s translation of Kircher’s book, published in 1670 at Amsterdam. It is not a geometrical drawing, and the dimensions are given in Chinese measures, which do not help us to love Kircher and Dalquié. M. Degrand is baffled by these measures;[135] but he admits that the Bridge of Cho-gan must have been a grandiose structure dating from a very remote time. Gauthey speaks with admiration of the “Pont de Fo-Cheu sur le Min”--a bridge not less than 7935 metres long by 19 metres 50 wide, with a hundred arches, all semicircular, and thirty-nine metres in their average span. The piers were nearly as broad, and their height was thirty-nine metres. Here is a bridge that Dean Swift ought to have put into his pictures of Brobdingnag. Gauthey seems to have faith in it, while M. Degrand has doubts. He says: “Even if we admit that there is no flagrant exaggeration in the documents from which the account of this bridge is taken, the workmanship in its general character, as shown in the drawing given by Gauthey, has a near resemblance to that in Roman bridges, and ought not to be assigned to a period earlier than theirs.” Gauthey describes the decorative treatment. Under the parapet of white marble ran a line of consoles; the piers were surmounted by figures of lions in black marble, cut from blocks seven metres long; and above each twentieth arch the footway was guarded by a gateway, _un arc de triomphe_.