Leicestershire school, William Bradford Community College, visited their twin, Nanshan Middle School in Sichuan Province.  Pupils toured the city of Beichuan which was terribly damaged by the earthquake on 12 May, 2008.
 
Pupil, Laura shares the experience:

Before entering the fenced off area, we had to pass through guarded gates.

The earthquake zone itself was cut off to everyone except those who had to pass through to reach their homes or those like us who had received special permission from the Communist Party.

None of us knew what to expect when we reached there, most of us thought that most of the damage would have been cleared away and that there would only be a flat ground where Beichuan once stood.

When we arrived we saw, in the bottom of a valley, a city the size of Leicester devastated by the earthquake.



At a first glance, the scene still resembled a city but after we departed from the bus, we saw the large crack in the ground, the broken bridge which had caved in and fell into the river, and the skyscrapers missing their bottom floors having being pushed into the ground.

Many buildings remained standing but distorted. Leaning to the left or right, walls missing or a large boulder embedded in its side.

However one of the strongest memories is of the deafening silence I believe reserved for ghost-towns.

 

Of the fifty thousand people who lost their lives in the earthquake, thirty thousand were in Beichuan.

One of the most harrowing aspects of the journey through Beichuan was the amount of domestic detritus left behind; clothes, furniture, toys, playing cards, an umbrella, a photograph in a broken frame and all over the ground empty morphine vials where the emergency services attempted to ease people's pain.

 
In one building the only part that remained was a flag pole.

This flagpole has been placed on top of the well manicured and cared for lawn, it's red flag billowing gently in the breeze.

Below the flag pole lie the bodies of 30,000 men, women and children.

Beichuan before the earthquake hit resembled an Alpine city.  It was a major tourist resort nestled in a lush valley and saddled by a slow moving river.

The contrast between the lives of Beichuan’s surviving inhabitants before the quake and their lives in blue tented refugee camps could not be more stark. 
                                                                          

How did they do this?

The Sichuan earthquake left more than 90,000 missing or dead.  Read more at BBC News. 

The twinning between William Bradford Community College in Leicestershire and Nanshan Middle School in Mianyang is part of a district link between Leicestershire and Sichuan province which includes 12 school partnerships co-ordinated by international links officer, Helen Trilling.

The partnerships are facilitated by the British Council.

More read about the William Bradford Nanshan partnership:  They felt for Chengdu, Miracle in Mianyang, Volunteers and From Our Young Correspondent: Mianyang, a pupil's account of helping survivors in a hospital.   Breakfast on BBC One also filmed the visit last summer of pupils from Nanshan Middle School to William Bradford.  Read more from the BBC Chinese service.

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