Ancient Town Facing Submersion as Company Criticized for Lax Protection

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, August 18, 2003

Ancient Town Facing Submersion as Company Criticized for Lax Protection

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A 1,700-year-old town might face submersion in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality as archeologists criticizing a hydropower plant construction company of being too slow to protect the ancient town.

Archeologists said a great number of cultural relics at GongtanTown of Youyang Tujia-Miao Autonomous County would be destroyed bythe construction of the Pengshui Hydropower Plant on the Wujiang River because they did not have enough time to carry out protection work as the project begins within months.

Datang Pengshui Hydropower Plant, the company under fire, was too slow to inform them in advance of that Gongtan had been a pivot linking central and southwest China for centuries, the archeologists said.

"We can't carry out our excavation and protection work without the certificate of entrustment from the construction company," said Lin Bizhong, deputy head of an archeological team from the Chongqing municipal institute of cultural relics.

Lin said they were kept in the dark until May when the construction company asked the Chongqing municipal cultural bureauto reassess a cultural relics report in the area to be flooded.

He said the report published in the late 1980s did not meet therequirements of cultural relics protection in the area because it was too old.

However, Wang Haisheng, a spokesman for the construction company, said the company had attached great importance to protectcultural relics in the areas and the responsibility lay with localgovernment.

Wang said local government should take charge of cultural relics investigation and protection in the areas facing submersionby serving as a go-between for construction company and archeologists.

Gongtan is listed as the top ancient and cultural town in Chongqing, the biggest city in west China, for its vast number of cultural relics, including its ancient houses built on slopes which are supported by wooden columns.

The protection of cultural relics has long remained the focus of major water projects in China, among which the most famous is the Three Gorges Project.

The hydropower plant, with an investment of 10 billion yuan (about 1.2 billion US dollars), will begin construction late this year and is expected to ease the power shortage in Chongqing when it is completed in 2007.

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