Hundreds of bricklayers worked on a 3,5m wall surrounding the facility that will help keep contagious patients in. Alarms were already mounted along finished sections of the wall. Surveillance cameras had been installed.

Thousands of other workers in yellow hard hats used power saws to cut doors out of the corrugated tin and styrofoam pre-fab walls. There were no beds in the small, barren rooms with tiny squat bathrooms attached.

Each room had an air conditioner and a hatch for food and medicine to be inserted without sending anyone in.

Cement mixers and other trucks were everywhere.

One was stacked with new televisions for the sick rooms. Another carried corpse refrigerators for the morgue, a creepy reminder that SARS has claimed nearly half its victims in China.

The disease has spread fear and panic in its wake in China. On Sunday, residents of a township south-east of Beijing rioted after learning of a plan to set up a SARS quarantine centre in an abandoned school, officials said on Tuesday.

But residents in Xiaotangshan seemed to be taking matters more in their stride. They manned makeshift disinfectant stations spraying every car coming in with pumps carried in backpacks.

Pedestrians and cyclists were made to pass over burlap sacks wet with disinfectant.

"The most dangerous place is also the safest place," said Ou Liping, who operates a tiny wholesale food shop not far from the new facility.

"I'm sure the construction is good. And anyway, you have to trust your own government, right?" she said.

Down the road, however, a middle-aged taxi driver who declined to give his name raised sharper questions.

"What about pollution?" he said. "What if there's a leak in the sewer coming out of there?"

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