Ji'an, a county-level city in northeast China's Jilin Province, has revised its urban development plan to protect ruins of the ancient Koguryo Kingdom.
Xu Caishan, mayor of Ji'an, said the city's downtown, where Guonei City of the Koguryo Kingdom was once located, would shift eastward. Modern architecture would be relocated and completely disappear within five decades.
Capital cities and tombs of China's ancient Koguryo Kingdom were inscribed on the World Heritage List on Thursday by the 28th Session of the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province.
The ruins are scattered in Ji'an City of northeast China's Jilin Province and Huanren Manchu Autonomous County of the neighboring Liaoning Province. They include remains of three cities and 40 tombs, Wunu Mountain City, Guonei City and Wandu Mountain City, with 14 tombs of imperial families and 26 of nobles. All belonged to the Koguryo culture, named after the dynasty that ruled over parts of northern China and the northern half of the Korean Peninsula from 277 BC to 668 AD.
Mayor Xu said they would also drop a plan to build an industrial park near the Taiwang mausoleum of the Koguryo Kingdom, and instead build the industrial park in a new location faraway from the mausoleum.
"We hope by doing so, modern civilization will not erode our precious historical relics," said Xu.
The distribution of the Koguryo ruins overlaps with the land used for production and daily life of one third of the city's population.
As local people learn more about protecting cultural relics they willingly relocate, Xu said.
In March 2003, civil servants with 43 departments of Ji'an City government moved out of the city government building, which was built on the ruins of Guonei City of Koguryo Kingdom, to work in 20 separate places.
The original location of the city government building has now been turned into a Koguryo Kingdom Ruins Park, where archaeological workers discovered a large site of palace ruins.
In the meantime, 1,150 households and 51 governmental institutions, factories, schools and shops, involving 4,145 people, have moved out of the first-phase zone designated for environmental reconstruction, covering an area of 108,900 square metres, and resettled down elsewhere. The move was aimed to protect the ancient city wall of Guonei City.
Jiang Yuhua, a 53-year-old farmer from Maxian Township of Ji'an City, said he never knew that the stone heap -- Qianqiu Tomb, one of the tombs for nobles during the Koguryo Kingdom -- some 100 meters away from his home was anything of significance until one day early last year, local cultural officials dropped in and told him the stone heap was a relic more than 1,000 years old and he should be relocated to protect the tomb.
"Having learnt that what I face every day is something significant in human history, I agreed to move," said Jiang. "I think it is worthwhile sacrificing a little for the benefit of children of future generations."
The local government has subsidized relocations of local residents according to a standard rate of 960 yuan (US$116) per square meters, and has financed the construction of two new villages and two buildings for relocated residents.
In addition to promulgating a regulation on protection of capital cities and tombs of the ancient Koguryo Kingdom in Ji'an, the city government has added nine people to the three-member detachment for security of cultural relics and authorized it to hire another 69 guards to patrol the 700,000-square-metre zone designated for protection.
Manchu Autonomous County of Huanren in Liaoning Province, where Wunu Mountain City, or the ancient Koguryo regime's early capital was situated, has not only published a set of rules on the site, but also enlarged the protected area from 2.15 square kilometers to 34 square kilometers, making detailed provisions on cultural relics, natural landscape and the biological environment inside the area.
According to Sun Xudong, head of the Huanren County government, they have dismantled a 75-metre-high TV relay station, a 200-metre-long cableway and two factories inside the protected area, where some 66 hectares of arable land have been reverted to green and 500 modern graves relocated elsewhere.
The department of publicity with Huanren County government has financed the compilation of materials about the Koguryo ruins to be used as textbooks among primary and middle school students.
The local TV station of Huangren County has also organized a county-wide contest on the knowledge of Koguryo so that more people can participate in the cause of cultural relic protection.
(China Daily July 5, 2004)
