In One of the Wettest Places on the Planet, Indigenous People Build Bridges and Ladders Out of Living Tree Roots

For hundreds of years, Khasi and Jaintia people in Meghalaya, India, have woven the roots of Indian rubber trees into structures that help them navigate flooded areas

Trishna Mohanty | Freelance travel writer

March 25, 2026

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What began as a stroll through broom plantations abruptly turns into a steep descent with near-vertical sections, each more precarious than the last. My shaky legs are relieved when we reach a sheer cliff that is impossible to maneuver. We will have to turn around, I think. But then I see it. Meticulously trained and grown over several decades to assume a precise form is a 50-foot-long cliff ladder made of living roots.

In Meghalaya, India, weather has shaped the land, and land has shaped the weather, for as long as its people can remember. To its south lies the East Khasi Hills district. Part of the Shillong Plateau, the district rises rapidly from the plains of Bangladesh, at a mean elevation of under 65 feet, to nearly 5,000 feet, over a horizontal distance of about six miles. This topographical wonder acts as a natural barrier, intercepting humid air masses and making the region one of the wettest on Earth. Sohra, popularly known as Cherrapunji, a town in the East Khasi Hills, holds Guinness World Records for the greatest annual rainfall, the greatest rainfall in 48 hours and the greatest rainfall recorded in a month.

When the juggernaut of monsoons rolls in, usually in June and July, raging rivers, flash floods and frequent landslides upend everyday life. The resourceful Khasi and Jaintia people, ancient stewards of the land, have learned to navigate the inclement weather by growing footbridges from the living roots of Ficus elastica (Indian rubber tree). Sometimes knotted, sometimes braided, often fusing and then branching such that it is impossible to identify where one root ends and another begins, the tangled chaos of woody roots resolves and emerges as a Tolkienesque structure. The bridges that have been documented display astonishing variation, their altitude ranging from 185 to nearly 4,000 feet above mean sea level and their lengths spanning anywhere from 6.5 to nearly 173 meters.

In 2017, on my first visit to Meghalaya, I learned two things. One: Beyond the two living root bridges that, according to a Lonely Planet guide, were “fast becoming the postcard image for Meghalaya,” an indeterminate number of such structures are scattered across the region. Two: No definitive map or central repository of information on the subject exists. Intrigued, I began searching for these architectural wonders.

That same year, armed with digital vernier calipers and tape measures, a team of German researchers trudged across Meghalaya’s terrain, pocked with gorges and ravines, measuring and probing as they concluded their third and final expedition. In their 2019 pilot study, they compiled an extensive inventory of 76 living root bridges, ranging from 15 to 700 years old and studied the bridge-building techniques of the Khasi and Jaintia.

“It’s definitely not an exhaustive list,” says researcher Patrick Rogers, who began a series of long treks in the region in 2013 and co-authored the paper. “Many living root bridges exist in incredibly remote, difficult-to-reach locations, where only a very small number of people are likely to know about them.” Some disintegrate gradually from neglect, others are decimated by natural disasters, and still others get overlooked because of their understated appearance.

But, from their analysis, the team came to better understand the Khasi and Jaintia’s construction methods. The bridge makers encase the tender aerial roots of a mature F. elastica, usually planted on a riverbank years or decades earlier, within a hollowed-out Areca catechu (betal palm) trunk supported by bamboo scaffolding. When the roots reach the opposite bank, they are directed back into the soil.

“Generations of builders contribute over decades or centuries to bridge structures, rarely with a clear or consistent plan,” the study states. They grow many structural elements, such as handrails, a second or third bridge deck, and underpinning struts, using the same method. “This combination of continuous growth and maintenance leads to a high level of complexity in each bridge, making simple mechanical analysis unfeasible,” the researchers write.

Every bridge is distinct in how its architects have improvised and shaped it as torrential rains damage or alter their creation time and again. Approximately 200 years old, the Double Decker living root bridge of Nongriat village is at the heart of a lush valley 1,293 feet above mean sea level. “One of the most documented examples of natural engineering,” according to Meghalaya Tourism, the bridge derives its name from its form. Two parallel decks, measuring 80 feet and 60 feet in length, protrude from the trunk of an Indian rubber tree over the Mawsaw River. Locals built the second, higher deck after torrential rains flooded the river and the lower deck, making it risky for villagers to cross the bridge. The Wah Thyllong living root bridge spans the Thyllong River near the villages of Nohwet and Riwai. Measuring 42 feet, the single bridge deck is supported by roots suspended from the branches of the same tree high above, reminiscent of a suspension bridge.

These two structures have appeared in several articles, documentaries and shows, from the Guardian to the BBC. In 2022, as the world emerged from Covid-19 lockdowns and Indian travelers sought novel experiences, the northeastern part of the country, marginalized for complex historical, political and social reasons, began to gain prominence. According to one report, by 2023, annual tourist footfall in Meghalaya had doubled over ten years. Nongriat, once an obscure, quiet village with a single community homestay (where I lived for a week in 2017), is now a thriving tourism hot spot with more than half a dozen lodging options. Farming, previously the livelihood of the populace of less than 200, is rapidly making way for tourism and its opportunities. Many residents work as guides, accompanying tourists as they descend some 3,500 steps into the valley.

Away from popular tourist circuits, every new bridge presents a new form, a new origin story and an intimate connection with its people. Wengstone Rangjem, a 48-year-old member of the Khasi tribe, has been my guide on several treks in the East Khasi Hills to locate living root bridges. As I step onto the cliff ladder, terrified, he goads me: “Women from the village here climb it while carrying huge loads on their backs. It should be easy for you!” One wrong move and I will go hurtling down to the Jashar River, so far below that we can’t even hear it. The rungs, shaped from the roots of the massive F. elastica above us, are as hard as wood, and I am baffled. How long have these other living root structures been around? Are they as old as the living root bridges?

The first known record of the practice appears in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1844. In a description accompanying a hand-drawn illustration of a living root bridge, Scottish Orientalist and geographer Lieutenant Henry Yule wrote:

“Two great roots run directly one over the other, and the secondary shoots from the upper have been bound round, and grown into the lower, so that the former affords at once a hand-rail and suspending chain, the latter a footway. Other roots have been laced and twisted into a sort of ladder as an ascent from the bank to the bridge.”

Over multiple trips to Meghalaya from 2023 until last year, I found more examples of cliff ladders in their infancy, with roots as delicate as a strand of human hair, being trained to take their final form years later. I photographed hammock-like platforms, the oldest of which can accommodate 30 to 40 people at a time. On precipitous slopes, I stumbled upon intricate, serpentine root staircases wound to provide secure footholds. The same roots are cajoled and steered in multiple directions, or sometimes woven like nets around massive boulders, to stabilize hillsides. In Nongblai, a village in the East Khasi Hills district with more than a dozen living root bridges (one of the highest known concentrations of such structures in the region), the roots of a chain of F. elastica trees seem to form a retaining wall along the escarpment.

A single building block underpins all these structures. F. elastica roots have a natural tendency to form a mechanically stable structure through inosculation: Two separate structures, such as roots, fuse together to form one continuous living structure. Various methods, such as braiding or tying two roots in a knot, are implemented to induce the phenomenon and form a dense, interwoven framework.

In 2022, the root bridges appeared on the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s tentative listing, the first step in a long process for potential inscription on the World Heritage List. It recognized that these living structures, or Jingkieng jri, “encapsulate a profound harmony between humans and nature” and “validate outstanding ingenuity and resilience.” UNESCO also noted “significant diversity” among the types of structures built from F. elastica, each a “unique site-specific response.” Bridges, ladders and steps let the Khasi navigate treacherous terrain in harsh weather. Tired farmers rest, recuperate and socialize on these platforms. Erosion and landslide prevention structures ensure the safety of settlements.

Living root bridges are not bound by typical laws of governance. Their upkeep and ownership vary from structure to structure. Of the 76 root bridges studied, 12 are maintained by individuals or families, 25 by a village community and 8 by a consortium of several communities. Fourteen other bridges are maintained by unknown entities, and 16 are left untended.

Every time I visit a living root structure with Wengstone, I spend an inordinate amount of time determining how I want to photograph it, while he quietly starts working on the structure itself, removing epiphytes, tying roots and clearing paths that lead to it. Sometimes, he will risk his life reaching places high above the ground to mend a structure or work on a section of it that is relatively new and unstable. He speaks of the work with reverence, as an invaluable “inheritance from the forefathers” and “a gift to our children and those who come after them.”

Nature is core to Khasi and Jaintia belief systems and cultural identity. In community-conserved sacred groves known as Khlaw Kyntang in Khasi and Khloo Blai in Jaintia, desecration of any kind, such as cutting trees or plucking flowers, fruits or twigs is believed to have grave repercussions from the forest deity. Rich in biodiversity, these forest patches are hallowed ground for various rites and rituals.

Indigenous knowledge systems lean on intuition and keen observation of nature’s predictable cycles and unexpected whims. Communities work closely to safeguard and champion environmental resources with the foresight to “take only what is necessary,” as Wengstone often says, and leave the rest for future generations. In New Mexico, the Zuni people use waffle gardens, with sunken squares that capture rainwater and runoff and slow the evaporation process. In Peru’s Lake Titicaca and India’s Loktak Lake, Indigenous people construct floating villages and aquaculture farms from plant material. What can we learn from such systems that have enabled survival for centuries? Can we replicate and adapt them as the world grapples with climate crisis and intensifying weather events?

Inspired by the living root bridges of Meghalaya, German architects Daniel Schönle and Ferdinand Ludwig (one of the co-authors of the pilot study) began building an experimental footbridge in the Neue Kunst am Ried Sculpture Park in Baden-Württemberg, a state in southwest Germany, in 2005. Built according to the principles of Baubotanik, an architectural method that merges living trees with more typical construction materials, the structure consists of 64 vertical and 16 diagonal bundle columns, each comprising 12 to 15 osier willows (Salix viminalis). More than 72 feet long and 8 feet high, it carries a pedestrian platform made of steel gratings. Over the years, its steel handrail has embedded itself into the living plant structure. Meanwhile, single plants and sometimes entire columns have died too.

“If living structural systems do become viable, they could profoundly reshape architecture—transforming buildings into carbon sinks that strengthen over time and respond dynamically to climate conditions,” says Julia Watson, author of Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, a compendium of global Indigenous practices and a call for their widespread adoption to generate sustainable, climate-resilient infrastructure. “Re-engaging Indigenous knowledge today is not an act of nostalgia; it is an act of recalibration. It is about restoring plurality in how we understand the world and recognizing that sustainable futures depend on dissolving the hierarchies that separated us from each other—and from the living systems that sustain us.”

Emdorlang Khonglam, headman of Nongblai, recalls a formative memory from when he lived at the edge of a cliff: “I grew up in the shade of a huge dieng jri [Indian rubber tree] near our house. The year we moved out of that house, it rained very heavily. The tree fell, and the cliff collapsed soon after. Some may say that it was a coincidence. But we know the tree waited until we were safe, and only then gave in. It was holding both the land and us together. It saved us.”

A tourist hot spot. An architectural marvel. An ingenious ecological adaptation. There are perhaps as many epithets for living root bridges as there are actual examples of them, but their most defining characteristic is this: They are part of the expansive vocabulary of a people whose lives are deeply intertwined with the roots of trees. To navigate an uncertain climate future, others may very well need to learn this language, born from extremes.

Trishna Mohanty | Read More

Trishna Mohanty is a travel journalist and photographer from India. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, BBC Travel and other outlets.