Picture a colossal building – the weight of an aircraft carrier – gliding quietly through a city street. No cranes, no demolition, no roaring machinery. Just a slow, deliberate shuffle, as if the structure itself had decided to go for a walk. That’s exactly what happened in Xiamen, southeast China, in one of the most astonishing feats of modern engineering.
When a bus station decided to move
In 2019, the bustling coastal city of Xiamen needed to make way for a new high-speed railway line. There was just one small problem: a rather enormous obstacle stood in the way – the Houxi Long Distance Bus Station, a gleaming transport hub completed only a few years earlier. Demolishing it wasn’t just costly; it would have been wasteful, time-consuming, and environmentally unsound.
So, engineers came up with a bold alternative: move the entire building. All 30,000 tonnes of it.
That’s roughly equivalent to 170 Boeing 737 aircrafts or one full-sized aircraft carrier. Instead of tearing it down, the team decided to pivot and slide the entire structure nearly 300 metres to its new home – brick by brick, intact, and without disrupting daily life in the area.
How do you move a building that weighs as much as a warship?
The secret lay beneath its foundations. Using 532 hydraulic jacks and a network of motorised rails, engineers developed a system capable of lifting and shifting the building centimetre by centimetre. A computer-controlled programme orchestrated the entire movement – one half of the jacks raised the station while the other gently nudged it forward.
The operation lasted 40 days, with the building covering around 20 metres each day. From a distance, the progress looked almost imperceptible. But when viewed in a time-lapse video, the station appeared to glide across the city like a giant mechanical creature taking slow, rhythmic steps.
The spectacle captured millions of views on Weibo, China’s social media platform, where users dubbed it “the walking bus station.” It also earned official recognition from the Guinness World Records as the heaviest building ever moved on rolling tracks.
Why move it instead of rebuilding?
It turns out that shifting the structure was not only more spectacular – it was also more practical. The bus station, completed in 2015 at a cost of around €36 million, would have been far more expensive and environmentally damaging to demolish and rebuild.
By choosing to relocate it, the city saved both time and money. The entire move reportedly cost €7 million, a fraction of what reconstruction would have required. And crucially, it avoided months of construction noise, dust and disruption to the surrounding neighbourhood.
Environmental planners praised the project as an example of sustainable engineering, showing that innovation can go hand in hand with preservation.
A global case study in precision and imagination
Today, the Houxi Bus Station’s relocation is studied in engineering schools across the world as a model of ingenuity and precision. It demonstrates how bold thinking, advanced technology and teamwork can solve even the most immovable challenges.
As one civil engineer from Tsinghua University put it, ‘This project redefines what’s possible in structural engineering. It shows that buildings don’t always have to be torn down – sometimes, they can simply take a little stroll.’
And so, the “walking station” stands as more than just a world record – it’s a testament to China’s growing expertise in large-scale infrastructure, and to the creativity that turns the impossible into motion.
After all, it’s not every day you see a 30,000-ton building decide to change addresses – one careful step at a time.
