The area around the Memorial Hall for Compatriots Murdered in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre is to be redesigned to make it more fitting.

The project, which covers 122 hectares of land in Jiangdongmen District in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, aims to ensure the surrounding area is more suitable for the hall, according to Monday's China Daily.

Zhang Weizhen, a senior engineer with Nanjing Municipal Urban Planning Bureau, said: "The area was a former suburb and has aged residential houses, small shops and vendors. The environment there is really noisy and not so solemn."

The whole planning project will be finished by the end of this year and the re-structuring work could begin in 2007, according to Zhang.

With a total investment of 493 million yuan (US$62 million), the new memorial hall will cover an area of 5.5 hectares and be completed by the end of 2007.

The hall receives about 1.2 million visitors every year, including 100,000 foreign visitors, according to statistics collected by the hall.

(Xinhua News Agency February 27, 2006)