Yingxiu Earthquake Ruins and Memorial Hall 映秀地震遗址与纪念馆

About Yingxiu Earthquake Ruins and Memorial Hall

The Xuankou Middle School ruins are described as the only relatively intact large-scale site surviving from the earthquake; they were the venue for the Party Central Committee and State Council's 2009 anniversary memorial ceremony and an important site on Xi Jinping's Sichuan inspection at the earthquake's tenth anniversary. The ruins are made up of a national '5.12' Wenchuan earthquake memorial monument, a memorial sculpture group, the white-marble sculpture 'Wenchuan Moment', which the site describes as expressing mourning for the earthquake's victims and for those who died in the rescue effort, and a '5.12' Wenchuan earthquake chronicle stele wall. In May 2009 the ruins and the memorial hall together were named a National Patriotic Education Demonstration Base by the CPC Central Publicity Department, and in August 2014 Yingxiu became one of three Sichuan provincial civil-servant practical-education bases. On 12 February 2018 Xi Jinping, revisiting Yingxiu, instructed that the earthquake ruins be well protected so that they become an important national patriotic-education base; in 2020 the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce established its own education base on ideals and convictions for private-sector figures at the site.

The memorial hall was a paired-assistance reconstruction project funded by Dongguan, designed by the architect and Chinese Academy of Engineering member He Jingtang, with a building area of 4,800 square metres; construction began in December 2009, the main structure was completed in December 2010, and the hall opened to the public on 12 May 2012 with an exhibition area of 4,000 square metres. A 2020 page describes the wider memorial site, hall and cemetery together, as covering 25,000 square metres and lists its exhibition halls as a prologue hall, an earth-mourning courtyard, a remembrance hall, a disaster hall titled 'mountains and rivers scarred', a reconstruction hall titled 'phoenix reborn' and a revelation hall titled 'mindful of danger in times of peace'; the hall's own 2014 page instead lists nine sections, adding a flowing-water courtyard, a rising courtyard and a discipline-and-integrity section. Both lists are reported here as dated snapshots rather than reconciled.

What to look for

• The Xuankou Middle School ruins themselves, left largely as the 2008 earthquake left them.
• The white-marble sculpture 'Wenchuan Moment' among the ruins' memorial monuments.
• The '5.12' Wenchuan earthquake chronicle stele wall and memorial sculpture group at the ruins.
• The memorial hall's exhibition halls, including the 'mountains and rivers scarred' disaster hall and the 'phoenix reborn' reconstruction hall, named in both the 2014 and 2020 accounts of the display.

Location & getting there

Getting to Yingxiu Earthquake Ruins and Memorial Hall

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

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