"This international prize for this yet-to-be-finished project is our salute to the Beijing Olympic Games," said Professor Hu Jie, Director of the Urban Planning and Design Institute of Tsinghua University and head designer of the project.

Born in Beijing, Hu believes the best design for Beijing's axis is to reflect the harmonious coexistence of man and nature. "We hope to bring nature to our city," he said.

Hu added that in order to make the forest park a window on Chinese civilization and traditional architecture, they had adopted skills from traditional Chinese gardening. Hu said they had enlisted suggestions from gardening experts from Beijing Forestry University on how to best showcase Chinese characteristics in garden design. "We also intend to make the best use of Beijing's terrain," Hu said.

According to Hu, the design has been heavily influenced by the classical gardens of the southeastern city Suzhou, which are known for their rock arrangements, in east China's Jiangsu Province.

Designers have also adopted new water recycling technology, which processes and reuses sewage water. To make the reclaimed water even cleaner, it is recycled for a second time in an eight-hectare wetland area in the park, added Hu. The water flows into the marshy area and is filtered by rocks and reeds before being used in other parts of the park.

New Sale Policy for Olympic Tickets Following the temporary suspension of the phase two domestic ticket sales of the Beijing Olympic Games, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) released a new policy of ticket sales on November 5. The second round of Olympic ticket sales was suspended after the booking system collapsed under overwhelming demand on the evening of October 30, the first day tickets became available. At a press conference on October 31, Rong Jun, Director of BOCOG Ticketing Center, described the jam at all the three sales channels of the Beijing Olympic Official Ticketing Website, 1,000 BOCOG-designated Bank of China (BOC) branches and the Beijing Olympic Ticketing Call Center. He said that the page view (PV) volume of 8 million in the first hour of sales far exceeded the original system capacity to handle 1 million PVs per hour. Moreover, the ticket applications submitted from various channels reached 200,000-also overrunning the system's capacity to process 150,000 per hour. At the same time, there were more than 3.8 million phone calls to the ticketing hotline at the call center. The communications jam on the main system also resulted in long queues at BOCOG-designated BOC branches. Different from the previously announced first-come-first-served sale scheme, the new policy will use a one-time lottery draw to determine ticket buyers. Ticket applications will be accepted at the beginning of December 10, and the submission period will end on December 30. There will be no priority given to applications received first. The ticket purchase limit and the date of the lottery draw wait for BOCOG's further announcement. "The first-come-first-served sale scheme doesn't suit China's national conditions. Compared with the Sydney Olympics, the population of Beijing is about the same size as that of Australia, while the total number of our tickets would not have a significant increase over the Sydney Olympics," said Wei Jizhong, a senior consultant to BOCOG. Ticket buyers who registered on October 30 at BOCOG-designated BOC branches and through the BOCOG Ticketing Call Center with a valid ID will still have priority in purchasing tickets. The ticket purchase guidelines for these ticket buyers will also be announced later. A total of 7 million tickets are available for the games with about 75 percent reserved for domestic sales. The first 1.6 million tickets were allocated after a lottery earlier this year.