Bulletin No. 1, 2013

6 Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2013 T he Mayan River is clear, shallow and little more than a trickle in the dry season. But in the summer, flash floods are common. In Dangzheng Village which lies along its course, people cross the river on wooden planks roughly tied together, a flimsy excuse for a bridge that raging waters would destroy every rainy season. But this was about to change. Under the leadership of Prof. Edward Ng , a g r oup o f s t ud en t s , t e a che r s and alumni of the School of Architec ture and the Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care of the Chinese Universit y set of f on 28 April 2013 for Gansu. They were joined by volunteers from Peking University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Stanford University and the University of Oxford. Between 30 April and 7 May, the group of 60 arrived at Dangzheng Village, 1,600 km away from Hong Kong, after a long journey consisting of two-and-a-half hours of flight from Hong Kong to Xi’an, a six-hour bus-ride to Tianshui City in Gansu Province, and three more hours on bus to the destination. Bidding the City Farewell On the morning of 30 April, the team of teachers and students from the five universities boarded a coach in Tianshui. As low adobe houses replaced high-rises, and the land came to be dominated by a few colours— mustard of mud bricks, black of roof tiles, green of trees in spring, and occasionally yellow of rape flowers, the bus left strips of asphalt and turned into a bumpy gravel road. Three hours since departure, the passengers arrived at Dangzheng Village. It was noon. After settling down and having lunch, they got down to business. Professor Ng designed a 30m×1m gabion bridge to replace the original wooden structure. Rocks would be placed inside gabions that would act as piers for the new bridge. The first job was making the gabions. Professor Ng did a demonstration and the teams responsible went to work. Within half a day, they