CHENGDU: He Ping, a 52-year-old taxi driver in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, sent a passenger to the Lidui Park in this city 48 km northwest of Chengdu early Sunday morning.
When he found the park which is home to Dujiangyan, the world's oldest irrigation project still in operation, was open to visitors free of charge, he made a quick visit to the site of the project on the World Cultural Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
"To my pleasant surprise, only some bricks and tiles have fallen from buildings near the project site and glass encircling a stone statue of Li Bing (builder of the project) built in the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220) has been shattered. And the dam site is intact," he said.
According to Cui Wei, an official with the Dujiangyan irrigation project administrative bureau, the park will be open free of charge for three months to promote tourism hard hit by the May 12 earthquake.
"The promotion is in response to the Sichuan Provincial Tourism Administration's decision to partially reopen the provincial tourism market on June 15," he said.
On May 12, the National Tourism Administration asked individuals and tour groups not to visit Sichuan in the wake of the earthquake.
Sichuan reopened 12 cities and one prefecture to tourists on Sunday in a move to revive its once-booming tourism industry. They include Zigong, Panzhihua, Luzhou, Suining, Neijiang, Leshan, Nanchong, Yibin, Guang'an, Dazhou, Meishan and Ziyang and the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture.
It partially opened Chengdu to tourists, for several major visitors' attractions were damaged in the earthquake, said Zhang Gu, chief of the Sichuan provincial tourism administration.
"Sichuan will promote visits to its attractions by locals in the province and ask provinces and cities which are helping Sichuan in its after-quake reconstruction to organize tourists to Sichuan," he told chinadaily.com.cn.
Sichuan's tourism sector has suffered a loss of more than 50 billion yuan (US$7.2 billion) because of the earthquake. But it has not caused havoc to the province's world heritage sites.
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