Kids sent to study outside disaster zone

Schools in some big cities have taken in students from earthquake-affected areas where classrooms were either utterly razed or rendered structurally unsound.

Five hundred primary school students from Anxian county of Mianyang, one of the areas hardest hit by the May 12 quake in Sichuan province, set off on a train from the provincial capital Chengdu bound for Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, on Thursday.

For eight months, the students will study in nine schools in Kunming, about 1,000 km south of Mianyang.