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More than 2,000 people joined forces yesterday to contain a fire in an ancient Tibetan town of mostly wooden houses in south-western China, but not before it destroyed about a quarter of those buildings, state media reported. |
There were no casualties reported after more than 2,600 residents were evacuated from the 1,300-year-old town of Dukezong in the resort county of Shangri-La, the Xinhua news agency said.
The nine-hour fire broke out about 1.30am (1730 GMT Friday), destroying more than 250 of the roughly 1,000 wooden houses that radiate up cobbled streets from the centre of the Tea Horse Trail town.
Firefighters, soldiers, police, local officials and volunteers battled the blaze in three neighbourhoods in the south-western part of town before containing and extinguishing it around 10.30am, Xinhua reported.
Putting out the fire proved difficult in the dry, windy weather. Firefighters told the China News Service their vehicles were struggling with “difficult traffic conditions.”
Photos posted on local news sites showed gigantic flames, some more than 10m high, devouring an entire neighbourhood and casting a huge orange glow in the dark while emergency services battled to control the blaze.
The cause of the disaster is still unknown but the damage is expected to exceed 100mn yuan ($17mn) according to the Chinese news portal Zhongguo Xinwen Wang.
As one of the oldest and best-preserved Tibetan towns in the region, Dukezong was once a staging post on the South Silk Road and is known by names including “white stone city,” “moonlight city” and “first step to Shangri-La.”
In an effort to promote tourism, Zhongdian county in north-western Yunnan province was renamed Shangri-La in 2001, after the fictional land depicted in the 1933 James Hilton novel Lost Horizon.
Earlier this week another high-profile site of Tibetan culture, the Buddhist Serthar institute located in the nearby province of Sichuan, was also the victim of an inferno, with 10 buildings destroyed.