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A massive construction program to transform a 780 year-old cultural street in downtown Beijing into the city's largest distribution center for ancient Chinese cultural artifacts is currently underway.

Liulichang Street, located just outside the Hepingmen (the Gate of Peace) in southern Xuanwu District, was originally built during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and later became a bustling book bazaar during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Today, the street is a famous cultural shopping center, featuring a wealth of antiques, paintings, calligraphy scrolls by prestigious artists and eminent scholars, as well as pottery, rubbings of inscriptions, calligraphy brushes, inksticks, inkslabs, top-quality traditional China-made paper, handicrafts and fine arts.

There are also teahouses and wineshops with graceful local styles and a Confucian Restaurant so that tourists from the locality and afar can take a break from shopping to sample some local Chinese specialties.

Deputy head of the district Zhang Wenhua said that 1.6 billion yuan (about 192.77 million US dollars) will be spent over the next two years to widen, straighten and further improve the street into a unique special cultural center with a total floor area of 80.7 hectares.

The first-phase construction will include the widening of an adjacent road from its present 12 meters to 34 meters and the renovation of an ancient square and the eastern section of Liulichang Street.

Meanwhile, a wealth of cultural relics, including a Fire-Fiend temple and the site of an old publishing house, will be renovated and refurbished.

According to Zhang, structures epitomizing the architectural style of the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China (1912-1949) period covering an area of 120,000 square meters will be rebuilt along the street so as to serve as cultural and entertainment facilities.