Construction began Wednesday on the largest housing project yet for survivors of the earthquake that leveled a county in northwest China's Qinghai Province.

The Denyingge residential project in Gyegu Town, in the heart of Yushu County, covers 47 hectares, making it the largest home rebuilding project since the quake.

The 7.1-magnitude earthquake on April 14 destroyed most of the structures in Gyegu Town, the quake's epicenter, leaving almost 3,000 people dead or missing and more than 120,000 homeless.

All the wood-and-earth houses in the former Denyingge Village collapsed in the quake, and new homes are being built on the debris.

The new homes will be two-story, Tibetan-style houses.

Kuang Yong, head of the Provincial Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, said they had adopted designs to withstand quakes and other natural disasters.

The rehousing project was marked by a brief foundation-laying ceremony Wednesday, but neither Kuang or the county government of Yushu gave a timetable as to when construction would be completed.

Nor did they say how many people the new homes would accommodate.

The first two home rebuilding projects in Yushu began in May, on the debris of the quake-leveled villages of Trangu and Ganda. The county government said construction would be completed soon and about 500 families would move in around the end of this year.

The state-owned Sinohydro Corporation, the prime contractor of the new project, promised the buildings would be well insulated to keep the residents warm in the bitter winter. Sinohydro is one of four state companies that have offered a helping hand in the rebuilding.

Gyegu covers 808 square km and sits on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau with an average elevation of 4,000 meters. Temperatures easily drop to freezing at night during the winter.

The rehousing project will take up to three years, so most of the homeless would be temporarily sheltered in quilted tents this winter. The provincial civil affairs department said about 50,000 such tents would be delivered to Yushu before the end of September.

Pre-fab homes, widely used for survivors in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, had been mostly ruled out for Yushu because they were too expensive and would seriously damage the plateau environment.

(Xinhua News Agency September 8, 2010)