Golden Bridge
— — two stone hands holding a road.
Not only on a wall.
“A 150-metre pedestrian bridge in the Bà Nà Hills above Da Nang, 1,414 metres up in the Trường Sơn range. Two enormous weathered hands rise out of the slope and hold the deck between them. The bridge opened in June 2018 and is reached by a long cable-car ride from the valley floor. On a clear afternoon the Han River and the South China Sea sit far below to the east.
Golden Bridge, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Golden Bridge sits at 1,414 metres on the Bà Nà ridge, about 35 km west of Da Nang in central Vietnam. It is part of the Sun World Ba Na Hills resort, a hill-station first opened by the French in 1919 as a sanatorium and redeveloped from 2007 by Vietnam's Sun Group. The bridge itself is 150 metres long and curves gently between two weathered hands that read as if they had been there for centuries. It opened to the public in June 2018 and quickly became the most photographed image of central Vietnam.
The two hands appear to be carved limestone but are in fact lightweight steel armatures clad in fibreglass mesh and sprayed concrete, finished to imitate the moss-darkened karst of the surrounding range. The technique is the same one used across many of Sun World's themed installations. The hands rise about 25 metres above the bridge deck and were designed by Vu Viet Anh of TA Landscape Architecture, who has described them as the hands of the mountain gods lifting a thread of gold above the valley.
Reaching the bridge means a cable-car ride from the Bà Nà lower station, a 5,801-metre run that was certified by Guinness in 2013 as one of the longest non-stop single-track cable cars in the world. The Sun World resort gate handles tickets and includes the bridge, the French-village complex above it, and the formal gardens. Mornings between roughly 08:00 and 11:00 are usually clearest; clouds typically close in by mid-afternoon and can shut visibility on the bridge entirely. Closed-toe shoes are sensible on the timber deck after rain.