China has opened up the nuclear base where it researched and produced its first nuclear weapons as a tourist attraction. The question is - do you really want to go?  The nearby Qinghai Lake provides a more scenic tourist spot.

The story by the Xinhua news agency, the state-run mouthpiece of China's government, tries its best but it's a tough sell.

China's so-called "Atomic Town", a base built in 1958 to research and build the country's first generation of nuclear weapons, is now officially open and being promoted as a tourist attraction.

In the remote grasslands of Qinghai, a vast and little-populated province bordering Tibet towards the west of China, the base is huge, covering 425 sq miles.

The supposed main attraction is an underground, reinforced concrete bunker which originally contained the main research laboratory. Along with the rest of the base, it was closed in 1987 and handed over to the provincial government six years later.

The bunker contains eight rooms, originally a laboratory, command room, electricity generation plant and telegraph centre, but which Xinhua warns "are now almost empty".

The few items that were once there - mainly, it seems, the unexciting likes of old telephones, clothes, bowls and food coupons - are now in a specially-built museum.

Xinhua quotes local official Zuo Xumin, who does his best to talk up the site's charms: "The underground headquarters of the nuclear weapons research and production base are a curiosity to many people. They can see the nuclear city for themselves."

But would you really want to go? Apart from the remoteness and the lack of much to see of any interest, you would also have to trust officials when they say the site has been thoroughly decontaminated.

Qinghai is not without its charms. Regional capital Xining is a fascinating meeting point of Tibetan Buddhism and Islam, while the vast Qinghai Lake sits more than 3,000 metres above sea level in the Tibetan plateau.

Perhaps the lesson is that "Atomic Town" is not aimed at foreign tourists, especially given Mr Zuo's other comment: "The base will be developed into a key travel site and it will become a platform for spurring the patriotic spirit of Chinese people."