DUJIANGYAN, China — Two months after an earthquake ravaged much of Sichuan province, workers are diligently salvaging bricks to restore a sixth-century Taoist temple damaged in the disaster.

As China begins to look beyond emergency response toward long-term reconstruction, experts on post-disaster planning warn that expectations should be realistic since rebuilding will take years.

"I saw them cleaning the bricks one by one," said Robert Olshansky, an urban planner at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has studied post-disaster reconstruction.

"You keep doing that, in a couple of years, you'll be done," he said, before cautioning, "Be patient. It takes a long time."

Olshansky was among two dozen international experts who came to Sichuan this past week to assess the damage from the 7.9-magnitude quake, which claimed nearly 70,000 lives and left 5 million homeless.

It is the first visit by such a large gathering of urban planners and disaster recovery experts to the quake zone, where many mountains were raked clean, towns collapsed into heaps of rubble and shoddily constructed schools were flattened.

The trip was co-organized by Zhao Jinhua, an urban planner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Zhao had seen news coverage of how the earthquake had devastated the region and wanted to find a way to help his homeland. His idea was simple: Could the tragedy be used as an opportunity not just to rebuild — but to do it right?

China "is very good at short-term response but less so at systematic longer-term work. That's why I brought in international experts," said Zhao, a doctoral student in urban planning.

Zhao tapped into the China Planning Network, an international group of academics that study urbanization in China, to assemble a stellar list of experts from Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley and MIT, as well as experts from Europe, the United Nations and Tokyo Metropolitan University in Japan.

"You don't want all the energy consumed by the initial response. ... These are experts on urban systems who look at longer-term city recovery," he said.

First on the group's agenda: See the damage inflicted in Dujiangyan, a city of 700,000 about 55 miles south of the quake's epicenter.

They were taken by bus through the main streets, where bare shells of broken apartment buildings remain standing but empty. Rows of blue and white tents — part of hundreds of temporary resettlement camps throughout the province — lined the sides of the road, a visible reminder that an estimated 80 percent of the city's residents have been displaced.