The town hit hardest by China’s earthquake, will never live again; at least not in the valley where its ruins cover the hillside.

A week after China’s most devastating earthquake of modern times, Beichuan is only for the dead. Entombed within its ruins, thousands are still missing. Their bodies may never be recovered.

On the street at the foot of the hillside that tumbled down to bury the Beichuan Middle School and most of its 1,000 students, a few victims who have been unearthed lie stiff in green and blue zipped bags.

A mass of tangled beams, chunks of concrete and broken walls is almost all that remains of the main county town. The few remaining streets, scattered with beer bottles, children’s shoes and scraps of paper, are silent and empty. Only rescue workers, troops and a few lonely survivors who refuse to leave the concrete graves of missing relatives pick through the ruins.

Wang Mingxing, 55, lost his eldest son who was teaching at the primary school.

He had returned to the folded ruins of his home to try to retrieve family possessions from the crumpled concrete slabs. A broken bookcase lay crushed. Little else could be seen. “There is no way to live in this place. The mountains around are just too dangerous,” he said.

Beichuan’s location meant that it was doomed. It was buried by landslides that tumbled down both sides of the narrow, steep-sided valley. When the soft ground slid as the earth moved, most buildings collapsed or fell over. No building is undamaged in what was a town of 30,000. Song Ming, the chief of the Beichuan Qiang autonomous county, said: “This time it is certain that the town will move.”

It will not be the first time that Beichuan’s geographical position along the Longmen Mountain fault line has forced it to be relocated. The town was moved away from the heart of the mountains to its current site in 1951 because of worries that it was vulnerable to earthquakes.

After the devastating Tangshan earthquake killed a quarter of a million people in the town near Beijing in 1976, experts visited Beichuan and assessed that it lay on a fault line dividing the Himalayas from the Longmen Mountains and was surrounded by unstable shale hills.

Mr Song explained to Chinese state media: “Every time there was a small tremor or a thunderstorm, a landslide was possible.”

Now the question is where to move Beichuan. The county line runs along the foot of the hills, meaning that a corner of flat land in neighbouring Anxian county may have to be carved away to find space.

“This is feasible, but it is up to the provincial government to make a decision,” Mr Song said. Studies have already begun on finding an appropriate spot.

But Beichuan will be reborn. Mr Song said it was unthinkable that the only Qiang ethnic minority county in China should disappear. The unique administrative region only won its county status in 2003. The Qiang minority numbers only about 200,000 people spread across five counties in Sichuan province. The matrilineal people hunt animals and collect mushrooms and herbs and also herd yak and horses in mountaintop pastures.

Now no one will live at the foot in the deep, verdant valley surrounded by small coal and gold mines and tea plantations and where pandas roam the hills. The Old Town, where debris stands seven storeys high and rubble is piled like matchsticks, may not be cleared. Mr Song said that it would be impossible ever to find many of those buried underneath.

A memorial would be raised on the spot, engraved with the names of all the victims in the town. It will become a place for survivors to mourn loved ones who will never be found. It would serve as a reminder for posterity, Mr Song said.

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