Pinglu Canal Opens to Navigation, Built and Supported by LiuGong

As the first vessel's whistle sounded at the Madao junction, the Pinglu Canal officially opened to navigation, turning a century-old dream of river-to-sea access into reality. Behind the milestone were more than 20,000 builders and the continuous support of heavy equipment. As Guangxi's leading high-end equipment manufacturer, LiuGong took part throughout, treating it not as an ordinary sale but as a duty to a national strategy and to its home region.

Cutting the mountains: over 400 machines in the earthworks

Once, the Shiwan Mountains stood between the Xijiang and Qinjiang rivers. To join mountain to sea, the land had to be cut open. The project required 315 million cubic metres of excavation across a 100-kilometre front on a tight schedule, an extreme test for the equipment involved.

From the start, LiuGong machines flowed to site: more than 400 units in total, including wheel loaders, excavators, dozers and motor graders, spread across the Madao, Qishi and Qingnian junctions and key sections for channel excavation, earth hauling, dam compaction, slope finishing and site levelling.

For the differing conditions, LiuGong deployed 30- to 90-tonne EHD heavy-duty excavators, fitted as needed with long-reach booms and other special front ends, handling soft and hard ground, deep digging and narrow-section work.

Mastering the water: solving the hardest conditions

Dredging was the key to joining river and sea. Traditional underwater rock breaking relied on blasting, which is risky and disruptive and poorly suited to long-term maintenance.

LiuGong focused on customised large marine excavators, solving the core dredger-matching technology and working through stability, underwater precision and deep-water dredging efficiency to put a 95-tonne marine excavator into service for the first time. Without explosives or divers at risk, the machine reaches the riverbed to break rock and dredge in one pass, while also supporting routine channel maintenance.

Building the bridges: OVM's prestressing expertise

If the channel is the canal's arteries, its 27 main bridges are its skeleton, each long-span arch a test of prestressing technology. LiuGong's Liuzhou OVM Machinery tailored each bridge individually.

The OVM team worked for more than 1,400 days, supplying prestressing anchors, rubber bearings, expansion joints and stay-cable installation across the bridges, including custom stay cables for 11 core bridges, keeping the key stages of bridge construction under full domestic control.

Parts stores built beside the worksite

Across a 100-kilometre front, hundreds of machines ran at high load, and the speed of after-sales response directly affected progress. LiuGong and its dealer Guangxi Qianlitong built a dedicated service system, moving the support point forward to the front line.

A specialist team was stationed on site, with fixed parts stores at key sections holding wear and common spare parts, plus routine inspection and rapid-response mechanisms so minor faults were handled on the spot and difficult problems drew immediate technical backup, minimising downtime.

Over four years, LiuGong machines kept stable attendance, working shifts and being dynamically redeployed during the critical earthworks and milestone pushes to keep the site running without interruption.

From the construction front to a new era of sea-bound development, LiuGong will keep pace with national strategy, supporting the channel with heavy equipment and dependable service as the golden waterway heads to the ocean.