China's second domestically built large cruise ship starts construction

A steel sheet cutting ceremony of the nation's second homegrown cruise ship was held at Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding Co Ltd on Monday, indicating the Chinese shipbuilding industry has basically mastered the core technologies in cruise design and construction.

The second vessel will not be a simple duplication of the first one; instead, it will be built based on a series of optimization, said Zhou Qi, vice-general manager of Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding, a unit under the world's largest shipbuilder the China State Shipbuilding Corp.

The 142,000-gross-ton vessel will measure 341 meters long, or 17.4 meters longer than the first version, and 37.2 meters wide. It will have 2,144 passenger rooms, 19 rooms more than the first.

The first domestically built large cruise ship, or the 135,500-gros-ton Vista-class vessel, took a floating in the shipyard at the Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding last December and is currently in its second-half phase of interior decoration and system debugging.