Huguang Guild Hall Complex, the biggest of its kind in China, reopens to the public Wednesday in the southwestern municipality Chongqing after more than one and a half year's of renovation.

The Guild Hall, located near the Yangtze River in the Chongqing's Yuzhong district, consists of various 300-year-old building structures from imperial Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and a couple of new ones with ancient style architecture.

Covering an area of more than 12,000 square meters, the complex also has a new migration museum, which displays the history of the Great Migration in the early Qing Period.

Visitors can also enjoy local operas and exquisite traditional handicrafts such as vivid Chinese new year or traditional Spring Festival pictures of Liangping County and grass cloth from Rongcheng County .

The government of the imperial Qing court ordered three million residents to migrate from areas such as Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong, Guangxi and Jiangxi to settle in and develop Sichuan, where there lived only approximately 800,000 residents in the early Qing Dynasty.

The immigrants built their own guild halls, where they gathered for recreations and dispute resolution.

As a historical center of business, culture and social affairs, the Huguang Guild Hall Complex serves as a window for people to learn about all aspects of the Great Migration, said Ge Jianxiong, a professor at Shanghai's elite Fudan University.

The Chongqing municipal government has poured 110 million yuan (about 13.6 million US dollars) into the renovation project, which was launched in December 2003, said Wu Tao, a cultural relics expert working for the renovation.

"Its new look impresses me very much. In this sense, Chongqing has set a good example for other cities to follow in the protection and development of cultural relics," said Luo Zhewen, a noted expert on ancient architecture from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, who visited Huguang Guild Hall Complex in the 1940s.

(Xinhua News Agency September 30, 2005)