A senior relics official from northwest China's Shaanxi Province said Saturday that the province would build four ruins museums, in a bid to attract more overseas visitors.
At the on-going national conference on museums which is held in Beijing between October 12 and 15, Zhang Zhenhua, vice-director of the provincial cultural relics bureau, named the four proposed ruins museums, such as the Zhouyuan ruins which was formerly the capital of the Western Zhou Dynasty 4,000 years ago, the mausoleum of China's first emperor Qinshihuang, the Yangling mausoleum which contains caskets of an emperor and an empress in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) and the Qianling mausoleum which contains the bodies of Emperor Li Zhi and well-known Empress Wu Zetian from the Tang Dynasty (618-907).
Zhang said the planned museums will display the ruins for domestic and overseas visitors to observe.
Among the top 10 museums in the province, seven are based on cultural ruins. In 1999, visitors to the ruins museums accounted for 70 percent of all the visiting population to museums in Shaanxi. Those museums earned 120 million yuan ( US$ 14.46 million ) out of the museums' total income worth of 135 million yuan.
The ruins museums also stimulate the service industry in neighboring areas, Zhang said.
Until to 2000, Shaanxi Province had 40 ruins.
(People’s Daily 10/14/2000)
