China to turn quake town into memorial museum

Beichuan: The crumpled ruins of Beichuan, the most seriously damaged major town in the Sichuan earthquake zone, are to be preserved as a museum and memorial.

The local government wants it to become not just a place to remember the 8,600 dead - almost half the town's population - but somewhere the Chinese people can learn to prevent similar disasters.

After securing the collapsed and leaning homes, schools and office blocks, it wants to leave them as they are.

"It is early days but a final decision needs to be made by the state council," said Zhang Jie, a spokesman for Mianyang city government, which overseas the town.

Beichuan sits in a cleft in the mountains which rise up from the rice-growing plains of Sichuan. It was only built in 1951 - the town's original site was considered too much of an earthquake risk.

The valley sits on the Longmen or Dragon Gate seismic fault, which triggered the quake. Landslides from both sides of the valley engulfed the town's two halves.

Zhang said turning the town into a memorial would raise difficult questions about whether to try to exhume the remaining hundreds of bodies from the wreckage.

He said 80 per cent of the buildings in the old part of town and 60 per cent in the new part were flattened. The plan was welcomed by some of the remaining residents. "It's so sad so many people died," said Ling Kaishun, 54, who had just carried his 97-year-old father to where his home once stood. "This can be a remembrance of history," Ling said. "We really should carry this plan out.