The city of Jiangmen sees the 2007 Guangdong International Tourism and Culture Festival a good opportunity to promote its Kaiping Diaolou (watchtowers), the only site in Guangdong that has been on the World Cultural Heritage list.
And the 2007 China (Jiangmen) Overseas Chinese Hometown Tour Festival, an inseparable part of the 2007 Guangdong International Tourism and Culture Festival, is naturally almost all about Kaiping Diaolou.
"Jiangmen is the ancestral hometown of 3.8 million overseas Chinese, or 10 percent of the total number of overseas Chinese living in 107 countries and regions. And Kaiping Diaolou is a World Cultural Heritage site closely related to the overseas Chinese," said Wang Nanjian, mayor of Jiangmen.
Combining Chinese and Western architecture, Kaiping Diaolou is a group of unique multi-storey and gray buildings for residential and defensive purposes. Kaiping, a city belonging to Jiangmen, has 1,833 such buildings.
The Diaolou buildings were mostly built by the emigrants, who went to Canada and the United States for mining and railway construction in the 1800s and returned to their hometown or sent money back to their families to build the Diaolou buildings to defense against bandits and floods.
Some of them are over 400 years old, while many more were built in 1920s and 1930s.
Kaiping Diaolou officially entered the World Cultural Heritage list in late June. It is China's only site on the World Cultural Heritage list this year, as well as China's 25th site to enter the list.
"The successful entry of Kaiping Diaolou into the World Cultural Heritage has not only attracted a growing number of tourists at home and abroad but also helped Kaiping secure large amount of investments for the tourism projects," said Wu Chaoping, mayor of Kaiping.
"Kaiping attracted capital inputs worth 935 million yuan for Diaolou-related tourism and culture projects on the first day of the Jiangmen Overseas Chinese Hometown Tour Festival alone."
"The city government of Kaiping knows well the importance to strike a balance between the protection of the heritage and the exploitation of tourism resources," Wu said.
Official statistics indicate that the city of Jiangmen received 10.15 million passengers in the first three quarters of this year, an increase of 38.4 percent from a year ago.
The sector generated revenues worth 5.05 billion yuan in the first nine months, up 32.5 percent from the same period in 2006. (By Zhan Lisheng)
