wrapped up with the unveiling of two stone carvings in the National Intangible Cultural Heritage Park in the western suburbs of Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province.

Although the park is located in a remote area, a crowd of some 2,000 people attended the ceremony Sunday afternoon (June 10).

"We have come a long way to the park to watch the unveiling ceremony of the two stones in which the Chengdu Declaration on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage are inscribed in Chinese and English," said Huang Suzhen, a 50-year-old high school teacher from the downtown.

The festival, which started on May 23, had the theme of "inheritance of ethnic culture, communication of civilizations and promotion of a harmonious world," it was the first international event held to promote the protection of cultural heritage.

Ding Wei, assistant to the Minister of Culture, explained the festival was aimed at furthering China's efforts in intangible cultural heritage protection and enhancing its global influence in the field.

The 19-day festival included the First Extraordinary Session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, where some 40 experts and scholars from all over the world attended the Chengdu International Forum on Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection and released the Chengdu Declaration on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The declaration calls on all nations to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage and raise people's awareness of it so that these traditions will continue to flourish in the future.

The attendees unanimously approved the Chengdu Declaration. And He Huazhang, vice mayor of Chengdu, was pleased to see everyone had reached the consensus on protection and conservation of the intangible cultural heritage.

Chengdu was chosen to host the festival because of its status as one of China's most historically and culturally famous cities and for its efforts to protect and develop cultural heritage, said Ding.

The municipal government also established an intangible cultural heritage protection center and the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Institute was formally opened on Sunday.

Text of the Chengdu Declaration (carved in two stones):

The intangible cultural heritage is human beings' memories about life and spiritual resources of creativity. It is a crystallization of human wisdom, a vivid embodiment of cultural diversity of the human world, and an eternal spiritual homeland of mankind.

With quickening process of economic globalization and modernization, great changes have happened to cultural ecology, and the intangible cultural heritage is facing increasingly big threats. Many precious intangible cultural heritages are on the verge of extinction. It has been high time to protect our valuable cultural heritages and legacies.

We call on the international community and governments of all countries and regions to attach high value to intangible cultural heritage protection, raising the people's awareness of and furthering efforts of conserving intangible cultural heritage, to enable the intangible cultural heritage to be with the human beings forever and handed down from generation to generation.