After visiting the Wolong Shenshuping Giant Panda Base – which is the newest base, opening to the public in 2016 as the original base in the area (Hetaoping) was severely damaged in the 2008 earthquake, and was never re-opened to the public – my friend, who works at the panda base and very kindly took me to Shenshuping, asked if I wanted to visit the earthquake memorial, so this is something we did on the way back to Dujiangyan.

Probably the most pictured and recognisable memorial is the Xuankou Middle School Earthquake Memorial, located in Yingxiu town which was the epicentre of the 12th May 2008 earthquake. The memorial is the school grounds, with the buildings remaining as they were (i.e. in a semi/completely collapsed state). I just can’t even begin to imagine how it must have been like experiencing such devastation. Yingxiu town itself had almost all homes destroyed, over half of the population did not survive, and the majority of roads in the area were cut off. But the town has been re-born – while I didn’t go to the new town area, the memorial site has been developed, and across the road is also the Wenchuan Earthquake Epicenter Memorial Hall, which is a combination of a museum and a cemetery. We were pushed for time, but did manage to just get to the museum for the last entry time at 4:30PM, so it was quite a quick walk around (I didn’t take any pictures). You could easily spend hours in there and I think it’s worth a stop if you are in the area or coming back from the Shenshuping base. I remember when I first went to China in 2016 and was discussing about going to different places, I’m sure my panda colleagues who had been going for many years said that the road infrastructure wasn’t completed yet – there still looked to be some construction going on when I was there (maybe a new highway perhaps?), but it was certainly easy to get to by car albeit a little winding in places.