As an important carrier of higher education, textbooks play an important role in improving the teaching quality and cultivating excellent professional talents. In this paper, we summarize the evolution process of the bridge engineering textbooks from four aspects, such as the order of publication time, the applicable bridge function, the applicable length of course duration and the press. The research shows that the bridge engineering textbooks can be roughly divided into four stages according to their publication time in the 157 related bridge engineering textbooks that we collected, which are unified compile firstly, then respective compile and thirdly unified compile, finally respective compile. Among these bridge engineering textbooks collected, the number of textbooks for highway bridge is more than railway bridge, and most of them are suitable for medium course. These bridge engineering textbooks were mainly published by China Communication Press and China Railway Publishing House. At last, the existing problems of the bridge engineering textbooks and some corresponding suggestion about its development are also proposed.