Beichuan ruins to become museum and memorial

The local government wants it to become not just a place to remember the 8,600 dead of the town, almost half its population, but somewhere the Chinese people can learn to prevent similar disasters.

After securing the town's collapsed and leaning homes, schools and office blocks, it wants to leave them as they are rather than demolishing them.

"It is early days but a final decision needs to be made by the state council," said Zhang Jie, a spokesman for Mianyang city government, which overseas the town.

Beichuan sits in a cleft in the mountains which rise up from the rice growing plains of Sichuan to the Tibetan plateau to the north. It was only built in 1951 - the town's original site was ironically considered too much of an earthquake risk.

The valley also sits on the well-known Longmen or Dragon Gate seismic fault, which triggered the quake. In the aftermath of the quake, landslides from both sides of the sheer valley engulfed the two halves of the town.

The question of what to do with the survivors of this and other shattered towns and villages is one of many huge logistical challenges for the government. It issued an international appeal for 3.3 million more tents to house the homeless.

It also increased the official death toll to 55,000 with 29,328 still missing. Of the survivors, it said 4,000 were orphans, though no decisions will be made about their future until the situation with the missing becomes clearer.