By Tracy Quek, China Correspondent
NO GUESTS: Instead of looking after tourists, the Chens are salvaging broken furniture from the rubble of their guesthouse.
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PENGZHOU (SICHUAN) - JUNE marks the start of the busiest time of year for Mr Chen Dingxu, when tourists arrive by the carload at his family-run guesthouse in the highlands of Sichuan.

Every summer, Yinchanggou - a scenic spot in the mountains of Pengzhou city, which means Silver Mine Gully in English - receives hordes of vacationers from low-lying cities such as Chengdu. Urbanites flock here for the cooler climes, lush pine forests, cascading waterfalls and limpid pools.

This time last year, Mr Chen, 29, and his wife, Ms Wang Jing, 27, were up to their eyeballs in chores, cooking up spicy homestyle dishes for guests, making up rooms and totalling up bills.

For the past month, however, they have done nothing but salvage broken furniture and dusty mattresses from under the rubble of their partially collapsed two-storey, 70-room guesthouse.

The couple is just one of close to 1,000 families, or about 80 per cent of residents in Yinchanggou, who make their living entirely from running country inns offering room and board to tourists.

Like the Chens, nine other families The Straits Times spoke to said they were preparing for another hectic, profitable summer when last month's quake struck, destroying all the buildings in the area.

Although the quake has cut off their economic lifeline, many residents who were evacuated in the immediate aftermath have returned. They are now living in tents in front of their once-impressive guesthouses as they wait for prefabricated housing units to be assembled.

'Our situation is different from other quake-hit towns. Every family runs their own business. We have invested hundreds of thousands of yuan in building our inns, so there is no way we will leave so easily,' said Mr Chen, who opened his inn in 2006.

The May 12 quake dealt a huge blow to Sichuan's thriving tourism industry, destroying or damaging 568 of about 4,000 tourist attractions and scenic spots, including Yinchanggou and the Wolong Nature Reserve, home to giant pandas.

According to China's tourism administration, Sichuan's tourism industry suffered a loss of between 53 billion yuan (S$10.6 billion) and 70 billion yuan in terms of infrastructure and other damage. Some 300,000 tourism workers are out of jobs.

Officials are now drawing up a revival plan for the tourism industry and are expected to unveil it next month.

For Yinchanggou's inn owners, recovery cannot take place soon enough.

It was in the early 1980s that farmers here first started converting their homes into inns. Business boomed in the past 30 years as urban incomes grew and city-dwellers spent more on leisure.

Depending on the size of their guesthouses, some of which had more than 100 rooms, families in Yinchanggou easily earned at least 100,000 yuan to 200,000 yuan a year - incomes way above the average in rural Sichuan.

In fact, takings were so good and steady that families were comfortable borrowing huge sums of money to build, renovate or expand their inns.

Ms Song Yan, 38, borrowed 900,000 yuan from relatives to build a spacious 60-room, two-storey inn four years ago. She reckoned that she would have needed just two more years to pay off the 400,000 yuan she still owed, if the quake had not struck.

It is the same for most families here, said Ms Chen Xiye, 40, another inn owner who started a decade ago.

'We are all in debt, some owe millions. But before the quake, we never worried about not being able to pay back our loans. Our incomes grew by at least 10 per cent each year,' she said.

Residents have not yet received the official word on whether they will be able to stay put and rebuild their homes and businesses, or be moved to a different location.

But all those interviewed said they wanted to stay, despite the threat of aftershocks and landslides.

'If they move us out, how are we going to earn a living? We have been doing nothing but tourism for years. Nothing else can give us the same kind of income,' said Mr Chen Xiwang, 42, who built up his business over two decades.

Asked what he felt was most needed to bring back the tourists, the inn owner said: 'Repair the roads quickly so that our customers can come back.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on June 14, 2008.