Dandong in China’s North-eastern Liaoning province is 541 miles from Beijing, but only some 105 miles from Pyongyang, North Korea’s seldom seen capital. But Dandong is much, much closer to North Korean soil as a visit to the most eastern city in China’s Dong-Bei will confirm. From Dandong’s shoreline on the Yalu River, the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Korea (PDRK) is just the distance of one short bridge away.

We, like millions of Chinese visitors from other parts of the vast country, paid the admission fee (¥30 per head) to tour the bridge open to the public✹. This bridge is no ordinary bridge even by Chinese standards, the bridge is truncated on the Korean side as a result of war damage. This is the famous Yalu River Broken Bridge. Built by Imperial Japan in 1911, the half-way section of the bridge was destroyed by an American B-29 bomber during the Korean War. The bridge has been deliberately kept un-repaired since for its Cold War propaganda points-scoring (and the eastern sections of the bridge subsequently dismantled by the North Koreans).

As you walk up the stairs from the entrance, you are bombarded with another bit of transparent Chinese propaganda extolling the patriotic homeland – a stirring large multi-figure set of stern-faced statues, heroic Chinese servicemen striking an ever-vigilant pose, on the lookout for foreign “enemies of the state” (there’s also another patriotic military wall sculpture on the front (street) side of the bridge.

At night the Broken Bridge is at its most visually striking as the bridge cascading into a revolving spectrum of colours. Climbing on to the bridge itself (draped in Chinese flags) during the day allows visitors, some in guide-led tour groups, more opportunity to study the bridge’s intricacies in detail. The swing bridge signage contains detailed information explaining its unusual engineering specifics, a “Unique Horizontal-Opening Beam Bridge” (a special thrill for civil engineering tragics and graduating Lego enthusiasts alike).

The bridge was very well attended on the afternoon/evening we visited, everyone making their way to the famously truncated section of the bridge to survey the damage close-up. The end-point, with people jostling for prime position, is also the best spot to peer into the “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea, home of the colourfully unstable President Kim. Just across from here is the “ghost town” like city of Sinuiji…at night bereft of lights, and during the day scarcely little to be seen, a scattering of seeming abandoned grey old buildings, a strange orange dome-shaped structure that catches the eye and a dilapidated Ferris wheel, and precious little else. Eerily it is seemingly also bereft of observable human life. An added nationalistic touch for very many of the Chinese visitors was to snap a selfie with both the red Chinese flag and the Sinuiji “still-life” backdrop.

Of course back in Chinese Dandong you can find a North Korean presence right here. Several of the restaurants in riverside Binjang Middle Road are North Korean (run perhaps by economic refugees who had once taken the chance to hop over the Yalu at some point to find more profitable trade and opportunity on the Chinese side).

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✹ there are in fact two bridges in Dandong, sitting side by side, that span the river to North Korea – the second bridge, the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge, is a traffic bridge for (a restricted number of) sanctioned vehicles making the journey to Pyongyang