Heritage officials are racing to rescue cultural relics dating back 3,000 years from the effects of a $25-billion project to pump water from the country's southern rivers to its arid north.

With only three years left before the project is finished, heritage workers have completed less than a third of their work, the Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday.

"Looking at it from our current excavations, whether in terms of quantity or quality, the relics along the (route) are far, far more valuable than those along the Three Gorges Dam," Li Taoyuan, a senior archaeologist from Central China's Hebei Province, was quoted as saying.