SHANGHAI - SOME will find the move ghoulish, while others will call it practical.

Some of the ruins left by last year's massive earthquake in Sichuan province, including a collapsed school, will open to tourists as early as later this month.

Local government spokesman Chen Wen said the one-day tour will include a visit to Beichuan High School, where 1,000 students reportedly died in the collapsed buildings.

Tour groups may go boating on a "quake lake" - a new body of water created by flooding and landslides - and visit a museum featuring an "earthquake simulation", China Daily reported, citing officials in Beichuan county, where 80 per cent of buildings were levelled and around one in 10 of 300,000 residents died in the quake.

Local officials say they are creating the tour in response to demand from people wanting to see tragic sites linked to the 8.0-magnitude quake that struck the province on May 12 last year.

Over 200,000 people visited the area during China's week-long Chinese New Year holiday in January.

The government will spend 900 million yuan (S$204 million) on the project.

Parking lots, snack bars, souvenir and local-product shops will be built at Renjiaping Village, the entrance to the county, while hotels will go up at the Jina Qiang Ethnic Minority Village.

Beichuan is China's only autonomous Qiang county.

The quake, China's worst natural disaster in a generation, left 87,000 people dead or missing.

A note of caution was sounded by Mr Wang Tingzhi, dean of the Tourism School of Sichuan University: "Science education and quake-relief measures should be themes when we promote tourism... (But) we should (also) consider the feelings of the families of the dead. Only in this way can the ruins not be commercialised."

The Sichuanese city of Dayi will open a quake museum that will also house Zhu Jianqiang (Strong Pig), the hog that survived over a month under a collapsed building. -AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, CHINA DAILY/ASIA NEWS NETWORK