After a year of construction, the future Disneyland theme park in the Pudong New Area has started to "take shape" with the land leveled, river channel created and some roads built.

Construction crews have almost finished grading the uneven land to prepare it for the large-scale construction in the next step. To reduce subsidence and create a safe amusement park, the builders have adopted a so-called vacuum-preloading method on the 1.68-square-kilometer plot.

They divided the area into 44 parts and inserted pipes into the land to draw ground water. The builder compared the work to "doing embroidery" on the land and said it meets the standard of an airport runway. The land will not sink by more than 1 centimeter for at least 50 years, according to the builders.

About 98 percent of the necessary soil has been removed to form the river around the theme park, and 84 percent of the soil of the future inner lake has been removed.

Construction on Tanghuang Road and Hangcheng Road, the eastern and southern border roads of Disneyland, will be completed and open to traffic by the end of this month, the Pudong New Area construction authorities said yesterday.

The Pudong government is responsible for the construction of 11 Disney-related road projects.

The other nine projects, including the Shenjiang lane elevated road, a bus hub and the major entrance road, are expected to be completed by June 2014.

The 11 road projects, which involve streets totaling 40 kilometers, will cost about 9.4 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion). A total of 492 households and 133 enterprises need to be relocated to make way for the road projects.

The theme park will lie in the heart of the 20-square-kilometer Shanghai International Tourism and Resorts Zone. The first Disneyland theme park on the Chinese mainland broke ground last April, and its first phase is due to open for business in 2015. It's the third one in Asia, after Tokyo and Hong Kong, and the phase 1 project will cost 24.5 billion yuan.

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