Melbourne, Oct 15 : Roaming around in Beijing’s Forbidden City would not require people to take a flight to the Communist nation, for now a virtual three dimensional recreation of the vast palace allows people to tour the grand place without leaving their living room.

In fact, the new virtual palace designed by IBM, also allows the visitors to dress up as an imperial eunuch and meet a courtesan.

Online tourists can also watch the Qing dynasty emperor feast at dinner, train fighting crickets and feed them with blood-fattened mosquitoes, or practice archery with the help of a courtesan.

The virtual palace, dubbed "Beyond Space and Time." was unveiled on October 10.

New Delhi, October 15 : China has about 84.5 million people who use their cellular phones to surf the Internet, nearly 30 per cent of the total number of netizens in the country, according to an industry expert.

Yang Zemin, director of the Telecom Research Institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that 68.7 million new cell phone users were registered in the first eight months, bringing the population of mobile users to about 616 million.

He reckoned that the population of Internet users had touched the 275 million mark by the end of September, 85 per cent of whom were broadband users.

He said that the number of fixed-line users was declining, reports the China Daily.

Beijing - Russia on Tuesday formally returned to China half of an island that was seized in 1929 by troops of the former Soviet Union during a border skirmish.

Chinese and Russian diplomats and defence officials held a ceremony to unveil new boundary markerson Heixiazi (Bolshoi Ussuriysky) Island in a border river, the government said.

The two nations signed a final agreement in July on disputed areas along their 4,300-kilometre border, with Russia reportedly conceding 174 square kilometres, including two small islands in the river.

Beijing - A court in China's Tibet Autonomous Region has sentenced eight Tibetan monks to between five years and life in prison after convicting them of bombing a local government office, the London-based Free Tibet Campaign said on Tuesday.

The group identified the eight monks from the Thangkya (Tongxia) monastery in Tibet's Gyanbe township and said they were sentenced on September 23 after a secret trial by the court in Chamdo prefecture.

Beijing  - China's central bank on Tuesday reported that the nation's foreign exchange reserves had soared to a record 1.91 trillion dollars by the end of September, fuelled partly by a large trade surplus.

The latest total of foreign exchange reserves was up 33 per cent from September 2007, following the addition of 377.3 billion dollars to the reserve in the past year, the People's Bank of China said.

China's foreign exchange holdings jumped by 21.4 billion dollars last month alone, the bank said.

China reported reserves of 1.53 trillion dollars at the end of last year, up 48 per cent from 2006.

Beijing  - China's main stock market index plunged by nearly 3 per cent Tuesday despite an Asian regional rally spurred by bank bail-out deals.

The key Shanghai Composite Index, which tracks shares traded in local and foreign currencies on the larger of the mainland exchanges, lost 2.71 per cent to end the day at 2,017.32, down 56.25 points.

The smaller Shenzhen Component Index also lost nearly 2 per cent of its value after both markets made initial gains in the morning session.

Only 217 shares traded on Tuesday rose, with 1,373 falling and 120 unchanged, state media said.