Symbol of British ambition in Asia: Myanmar’s Gokteik Bridge, once tallest in the world, toppled by war

The bridge was itself a marvel. Steel components were shipped 10,000 miles (16093 km) from Pennsylvania to northern Burma, where British engineers supervised its rapid assembly across the gorge. And yet the viaduct never fulfilled the purpose for which it was built. The railway sputtered out at Lashio, well short of China, leaving Gokteik as what many later called a “bridge to nowhere.”

The failure had less to do with engineering than with politics. British planners, convinced of what historian Thant Myint-U has described as the “Yunnan Myth”—the belief that fabulous wealth lay just across the border—underestimated the complexity of the people who lived in Burma’s highlands. The Shan and Kachin communities had little interest in being folded into colonial schemes. As political scientist James C. Scott wrote in The Art of Not Being Governed, they mastered an “art of not being governed,” making themselves largely invisible to bureaucrats who tried, and failed, to bend the region to imperial designs.

Despite the bridge leading to nowhere, it was still an important part of Burma’s history.

Th During World War II it became a strategic target, a vital link in the Burma Campaign. In 1943, Allied bombers, including planes from the US Tenth Air Force, attacked it to disrupt Japanese supply lines.