Letter from Sichuan: JUST BEYOND a huge sign boasting of Dujiangyan's status as a "Top Tourist City of China", tents appear in their hundreds, and scenes of terrible destruction begin to unfold as if the once picturesque town has been pounded by a meat grinder.
Many parts of Dujiangyan were left almost untouched by the May 12th earthquake, in which over 90,000 people died or are missing, and it looks like pure luck the way the quake completely demolished some streets and left others intact save for a coating of grey dust.
In parts of the city, the houses and shops on one side of the street are all devastated, while across the road, the houses and businesses are fine.
The shopfronts in the badly damaged parts have the look of a Potemkin village about them, with no houses behind them, just the edifices with posters saying "Do not enter, unsafe building" hastily stuck to the door-posts.
The shopfronts are cracked and many subsided badly during the earthquake. Behind them lie piles of rubble and hundreds of tents. There is something exhausting about looking at the devastation, it's a reminder of how much work needs to be done to get things back to something even approaching normality.
There are vast swathes of Sichuan province like this, and the roads are filled with trucks piled high with people's possessions as they go off to join their relatives in other parts of the country, or move to one of the tent cities in Mianyang.
Clambering over a hefty pile of rubble to gain access to one of the tent cities in downtown Dujiangyan, I find myself standing on a dead chicken and am just questioning the wisdom of my approach when an old woman starts waving at me.
"Go around," she shouts. And sure enough, there is an easier way through the debris.
"Welcome, welcome," says Zhou Yunhong, the elderly resident who brought me in the right way and who lives in a tent a few metres from her apartment, which is still standing but structurally unsound.
This is another huge challenge facing the reconstruction programme - what to do with the damaged buildings which are not destroyed, but unlivable just the same.
Despite our efforts to refuse, Ms Zhou gives us a bottle of water each - we later learn that she gets two bottles a day, so we have taken a day and a half worth of water from her. You have to drink the water offered in those circumstances, to refuse would be more than rude, it would be downright hostile.
Behind her people play badminton in the rows between the tents.
"It will take us 10 years to rebuild this area. On the day of the quake I ran to my husband and my grandson who were sleeping upstairs. They were okay, but I fell so many times on the stairs on the way up. There are so many disabled people here now we don't have the strength to smile anymore," she says.
Her neighbour Zin Yunsheng, who remembers the struggles of the Long March, the Cultural Revolution, and the other epochal events that shaped China in the second half of the last century, is relentlessly patriotic but clearly worried.
"The first priority has been to save lives. That's finished now. Now it's about rebuilding. People have no money, they can't save. They've given us rice and water, but what's the next step? A lot of people don't have enough to eat. The government also has to make sure the Olympics are great, so it's a lot for the government to do," says Ms Qin.
Dujiangyan is one of the most famous sites in China, known chiefly as a tourist site within easy striking distance of the provincial capital Chengdu, 56 kilometres away; a popular weekend destination.
The Dujiangyan irrigation system dates from 256 BC, during the tumultuous period of Chinese history known as the Warring States era. The region is prone to flooding, similar to the kind of floods seen after the earthquake, and governor Li Bin had to find a way to resolve the problem.
The Min river was in use by warships, so he couldn't build a dam; instead he constructed the Yuzui levee, which redirected part of the river along a channel through Mount Yulei on to the Chengdu plain.
The system stopped flooding and still irrigates over 5,300 square kilometres of land in the region and contributed to Sichuan's reputation as the grain basket of China.
The Yuzui levee was cracked in the quake, but survived. The Two Kings Temple, built to honour Li Bing and his son, was destroyed by the quake.
Rebuilding the tourist business is not a priority right now, sheltering people is. Tents are everywhere, but, gradually, prefab housing is starting to be erected in the worst-affected areas.
The tent city is clean, and well-supplied with provisions - the army of volunteers, as well as the regular People's Liberation Army, has been diligent in keeping people in good shape.
But it's hot in the tents - 40 degrees at night and no
electricity to power a fan, so people are getting edgy. Not in a subversive way, as people spend a lot of time thanking the government for their efforts here, but in a few months, tent life is going to become extremely difficult. People are already complaining about it.
Luck is a big factor in any earthquake. There is a lot of superstition doing the rounds. The current bout of floods sweeping southern China seems to have fulfilled the final stanza of an internet curse involving the Fuwas, Beijing's five Olympic mascots.
One Fuwa is a panda, the symbol of Sichuan. Another resembles a torch, which is said to represent the protests against the international Olympic torch relay; a Tibetan antelope is seen as a symbol of the unrest in that region in March; a swallow that looks like a kite has been linked to a deadly train crash in Shandong province. The final Fuwa, a fish, has been linked to widespread flooding this month in southern and central China.
On the way back from Dujiangyan, our driver explains why he refused to eat when in the earthquake zone - it's bad luck. And our car is sprayed with disinfectant as we drive out of the zone, to make sure we are not bringing any unwelcome infections, or misfortune, out of the quake zone with us.
