Siben Bridge, colloquially known as Sifen Bridge, is located in Kuaqiao Port, Liaobing Village of Tongli Town in Wujiang District, Suzhou, China. In 2013 it was listed as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level by the State Council of China.
The Bridge was built by Ye Yin, a local poet of Tongli, during the Baoyou Period of the Southern Song Dynasty. Ye Yin, author of the Verses of the Shunshi Hall, admired the Tang Dynasty poet Lu Guimeng profoundly and dedicated his life to collecting Lu Guimeng’s poems and essays. He published a series of twenty volumes of the Collected Works of Puli (an alias name of Lu Guimeng). Ye was a pious charity contributor who built several Bridges for Tongli Town. Siben was one of them.
Siben Bridge is a single arched bridge built with Wukang stones. The arch was constructed section by section on both parallel sides. The surface stone of the bridge is slightly curved. On both borders are adorned with round dots pattern, known to Chinese as “nail pattern”. The bridge, taking east-west direction, is 22.5meter long and 1.75 meters wide in the middle. The bridge span rises 4.5 meters high and is 9 meters in length, forming a standard semicircular arch with the rise and span ratio 1:2. The bridge remains the original structure of Song Dynasty, though some railing panels are missing and stone steps were partly replaced during a repair in later period. A renovation was done to the bridge in the fall of 2008.