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The armies of Emperor Taizu of Song had a large pontoon bridge built across the Yangtze

River in 974 in order to secure supply lines during the Song Dynasty's conquest of
the Southern Tang.

On October 22, 1420, Ghiyasu'd-Din Naqqah, the official diarist of the embassy sent by
the Timurid ruler of Persia, Mirza Shahrukh (r. 1404–1447), to the Ming

Dynasty of China during the reign of the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424), recorded his
sight and travel over a large floating pontoon bridge at Lanzhou (constructed earlier in

1372) as he crossed the Yellow River on this day. He wrote that it was:

... composed of twenty three boats, of great excellence and strength attached together by a

long chain of iron as thick as a man's thigh, and this was moored on each side to an iron
post as thick as a man's waist extending a distance of ten cubits on the land and planted

firmly in the ground, the boats being fastened to this chain by means of big hooks. There

were placed big wooden planks over the boats so firmly and evenly that all the animals
were made to pass over it without difficulty.

2.2. GRECO-ROMAN ERA

The Greek writer Herodotus in his Histories, records several pontoon bridges. The Persian

Emperor Darius used a 2-kilometre (1.2 mi) pontoon bridge to cross the Bosphorus and
Emperor Caligula built a 2-mile (3.2 km) bridge at Baiae in 37 AD. For Emperor Darius I

The Great of Persia (522–485 BC), the Greek Mandrocles of Samos once engineered a

pontoon bridge that stretched across the Bosporus, linking Asia to Europe, so that Darius
could pursue the fleeing Scythians as well as move his army into position in the Balkans to

overwhelm Macedon. Other spectacular pontoon bridges were Xerxes' Pontoon
Bridges across the Hellespont by Xerxes I in 480 BC to transport his huge army into

Europe:

and meanwhile other chief-constructors proceeded to make the bridges; and thus they made

them: They put together fifty-oared galleys and triremes, three hundred and sixty to be
under the bridge towards the Euxine Sea, and three hundred and fourteen to be under the

other, the vessels lying in the direction of the stream of the Hellespont (though crosswise

in respect to the Pontus), to support the tension of the ropes. They placed them together
thus, and let down very large anchors, those on the one side towards the Pontus because of

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