Construction of a holiday resort, which is alleged to spoil the environment of the Longmen Grottoes, a renowned buddhist World Heritage site in central China's Henan Province, was ordered to halt.

The government of Luoyang City, where the grottoes sheltered more than 97,000 buddhist sculptures of at least 1,100 years old, was investigating whether the holiday village project violated the regulations on World Heritage protection, said Yang Xiaoyang, deputy secretary-general of the city's government.

The suspected illegal construction, first exposed on the Internet earlier this week and then spread by media reports, referred to the 27 villas less than five kilometers west of the Longmen Grottoes.

"According to the city's regulations on World Heritage protection, any construction in the area where the villas are, needs approvals from the city's urban planning bureau and cultural heritage bureau," said Yang.

"However, the holiday village developer had no approval from either of the bureaux. So we can come to the conclusion that the buildings are illegal," said Yang.

Built in the late Northern Wei and Tang dynasties (316-907), The Longmen Grottoes was listed as a World Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2000 as a representative of the Chinese stone carving.

"The city's government is very cautious on approving the construction projects near the grottoes, in case they may cause damage to their environment with possible pollution or their abrupt modern look may go against the grottoes' ancient graceful style," said Yang.

The villas, in six lines, belong to the Longxiang Shanzhuang Catering Limited Company of Yichuan County, which is run by a villager of Guozhai Village Guo Jungao and his friends.

Construction workers are tearing down the boundary wall around the villas.

"The construction halted soon after the local papers made reports. We are here waiting for the boss to pay our salaries," said one of the workers, who declined to give his name.

Guo Jungao was not available, but his elder brother Guo Xinggao told Xinhua that the construction started in March and the county's land use management bureau and urban planning office had both issued approvals for the project.

"We were fined 3,000 yuan by the county's construction bureau for lacking its approval, but it didn't ask us to suspend the construction," said Guo.

According to their original plan, the villas would be used as guest rooms and there would also be restaurants in the holiday village, said Guo.

"We have invested 2 million yuan (more than US$294,000) to build the villas, but now, we are ordered to tear down all of buildings, then who should be responsible for our losses?" said Guo.

The city government of Luoyang promised to give an answer to Guo's question after the investigation ended.

"The case exposed the loopholes of our supervision work and we should take lessons from it to improve the government's supervision mechanism," said Yang.

(Xinhua News Agency December 13, 2008)