CHENGDU, March 2 (Xinhuanet) -- China's largest ebony museum will be opened on May 1 in the suburb of Leshan City in southwest China's Sichuan Province, the first of this kind in China.

    Construction of the project is divided into two phases. It took 10 years to complete the first phase of the museum, which covers a floor space of 11,000 square meters, said Jiang Jilin, chairman ofthe Ebony Culture Museum Co. The first phase cost an investment of 120 million yuan (about 15 million U.S.dollars).

    The second-phase, covering 1.3 hectares of land, will cost 80 million yuan (about ten million U.S. dollars) to build and is expected to be completed at the end of 2007.

    The two-story museum houses 381 pieces of ebony artworks. It aims to collect, study and display ebony sculpture works.

    Ebony, with another name of "dark heavy wood", is a kind of rare species used for making high-grade furniture and Buddhist images.

    After being buried under riverbed silt for tens of thousand years as a result of diastrophism, large tracts of ancient trees were turned into ebony when brought to light by quarry workers, Jiang said. Enditem