The 7-square-kilometre park will have a weapons display along with sightseeing and defence education areas as well as a 3.3-million-square-metre marine area.

However, the project still needs an administrative go-ahead from the local government, according to Yang Weiguo of the Beiyang Recreational Harbor Shipping Corp, the park developer. He gave no further explanation.

If all goes as planned, the park will be the final resting place for the Kiev, a 27-year-old carrier that a Tianjin company bought for 70 million yuan (US$8.4 million) from Russia, according to the Beiyang web.

The new owner had originally planned to cut the vessel up for scrap.

The carrier was decommissioned in 1995 and has been stripped of engines, weapons and communications equipment.

In August 2000, the Kiev managed to arrive at Tianjin and in May 2001 was sent on to nearby Qinhuangdao port for repairs.

Chinese admirers of aircraft carriers have shown a great deal of interest in it, with 2,000 tourists visiting the Kiev each day on average while workers were putting it in shape.

In the past year, it has attracted at least a million people to Qinhuangdao for its summer tourism, according to the city's tourism bureau.

During the two-day International Children's Day holiday, 200,000 people, many from Beijing and northeastern provinces, visited the Kiev. The carrier will be towed back to Tianjin in September, officials said.

This is not China's first foreign carrier. In South China, the city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, beat the northerners to the mark in 2000 when it opened the first aircraft carrier theme park -- Minsk World -- using another decommissioned aircraft carrier from the former Soviet Union, the Minsk.

More than 2.5 million people have visited the park.

(China Daily July 31, 2002)