A hotel comprising 248 cave dwellings in eight rows is expected to earn a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest structure of its kind.

The cave hotel opened to tourists Thursday in Yan'an, once the revolutionary base of Chinese Communists.

Local officials say the hotel, in Yan'an Prefecture of Shaanxi Province, is even bigger than the current world record-holding cave-dwelling, Yan'an University, which has 226 cave houses in six rows.

The cave hotel is located in Yangjialing Village, about 500 meters from cave-houses used by Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, and other revolutionary veterans between 1936 and 1948.

Built to modern three-star hotel standards, the cave-hotel features unusual architecture and offers visitors the chance to sample folk customs with furnishings like stone grinders, paper- cuts and Chinese heated brick beds.

Just like Yan'an's traditional loessial cave-houses built on the Loess Plateau, the new cave-dwellings are cool in summer and warm in winter.

The hotel, built at a cost of over 12 million yuan (US$1.4 million), will be another tourist attraction in Yan'an, local officials believe.

(China Daily May 24, 2002)