Cooling, a street on world heritage site Mount Lushan in eastern China's Jiangxi Province, re-opened to tourists in the May Day holiday after a restoration project, an official with the Lushan administration confirmed Sunday.
With an altitude of 1,164 meters, the street, which got its English name for its cool and cozy climate, has won a fame for villas alongside with different styles from more than 20 countries.
"The project aimed to restore the landscape of the 1920s along the street. To achieve the goal, project undertakers consulted historical documents and used wooden and stone materials that had been in vogue then to revive the time-honored architectural genres," Fan Yunjiang, head of commerce management with the Lushan administration, told Xinhua.
The project costs 10 million yuan (1.5 million U.S. dollars), Fan added.
Since 1895 when a British missionary bought 53.3 hectares of land at Cooling to develop real estate for holiday purpose, a group of villas with Russian, British, American, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Portuguese styles had been built till the 1920s.
Mount Lushan was ranked as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1996 and included into the world geological park list in 2004.
(Xinhua News Agency May 3, 2009)
