China opens one of world’s largest bridges:

China recently inaugurated one of the world’s longest bridges on Thursday. Presented as the “world’s longest sea bridge”, the 36-kilometre (22-mile) structure connects Jiaxing city near Shanghai to the port city of Ningbo in the eastern province of Zhejiang. The 11.8 billion yuan (1.7 billion dollars) bridge cuts the length of the road trip from Shanghai to Ningbo by 120 kilometres.

The bridge is slightly shorter than the 38.4-kilometre Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Bridge in the southern United States, which is often billed as the world’s longest.

World’s Largest Airport Terminal in Beijing:

The new Terminal 3 at the airport in Beijing is twice the size of the Pentagon. Adorned in the colors of imperial China, with a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel-sheathed structure, designed by the British architect Norman Foster, cost $3.8 billion and can handle more than 50 million passengers a year.

The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible. In terms of floor area, at 986,000 m² (10.6 million sq ft), it is slightly smaller than the Aalsmeer Flower Auction in the Netherlands, which is listed as 990,000 m².

In addition, construction is winding down on the new headquarters of the country’s main state television network, China Central Television. The $700 million building consists of two leaning, L-shaped towers that rise 234 meters, or 768 feet, and may be the world’s largest and most expensive media headquarters.

China is also home to the world’s largest shopping mall - the 650,000-square-meter, or seven-million-square-foot, South China Mall, located in Dongguan, the largest hydroelectric dam - Three Gorges, located in Sandouping and which spans the Yangtze River, and (what may be) the world’s largest concert hall, the National Center for the Performing Arts, a $400 million opera house and theater facility also known as The Egg.

Three Gorges Dam

National Centre for the Performing Arts, AKA The Egg

This is the image China would like to project as it plays host to the Olympic Games this summer - a confident rising power constructing dazzling new monuments that exemplify its rapid progress and its audacious ambition.”Beijing is a huge experimental site right now,” said Zhu Wenyi, dean of the school of architecture at Tsinghua University. “This modern architecture is the identity of modern China.” Thirty years after economic reforms began, this country has built a series of superstructures that almost seem intended more for the Guinness Book of World Records than cityscapes.