China's Honghe Hani Rice Terraces is now a World Heritage site, with its induction into UNESCO's World Heritage List on Saturday. The announcement was made at the World Heritage Committee's 37th session, currently being held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The International Council on Monuments and Sites had nominated the rice terraces in Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous region in Yunnan province, Southwest China.

"The Honghe Hani terraces are an outstanding reflection of elaborate and finely tuned agricultural, forestry and water-distribution systems that are reinforced by long-standing and distinctive socioeconomic-religious systems," the council said.

"Its terraced landscape reflects, in an exceptional way, a specific interaction with the environment mediated by integrated farming and water-management systems, and underpinned by socioeconomic-religious systems that express the dual relationship between people and gods, and between individuals and community, a system that has persisted for at least a millennium, as can be shown by extensive archival sources."

Deputy director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage Tong Mingkang said: "The inscription of the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces on the World Heritage List has promoted the conservation of new type of cultural heritage and provided a good example for China's future nominations."

China joined the World Heritage Convention in 1985 and started the World Heritage application journey one year later. The Honghe Hani Rice Terraces marks China's 45th World Heritage and 31st World Cultural Heritage, making China the second country with the most nominations, after Italy.

zhangzixuan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/23/2013 page1)