I'm not sure how I managed to miss this but almost two months ago OLPC.Asia launched OLPC's first deployment in China. While the corresponding blog entry is relatively short it does contain some interesting information:

Happy Chinese XO owners

On the last day of school in June 2009, 1,000 XO laptops reached the hands of eager school children of Puyang Primary School, Dujiangyan, Sichuan, marking an important milestone in OLPC APAC's pilot scheme to donate XO laptops to children affected by the massive Sichuan earthquake on 12 May 2008.

More information can be found in the corresponding presentation (PDF, 1.4MB) which among other things says that Puyang Primary School has just over 1,600 students. That means this initial deployment reaches almost two thirds of the students. That's quite impressive I dare say!

What immediatedly struck me as interesting is that the laptops were handed out on the last day of school before the children went into their holidays. Initially that made me a bit skeptical however when reading the presentation mentioned above I learned that teacher training had already taken place in April (photos of it can be found on OLPC.Asia's Flickr stream). Additionally the children had all received at least a half-day introduction to learn the basics of using their XO. It will certainly be interesting to see if and how the kids use the laptops during the holidays.

What I find particularly encouraging about this project is that OLPC.Asia seems to have built a strong volunteer community around it. At least that's the impression I took away from that presentation and talking to some of the people supporting the efforts in Sichuan. So I'm excited to see China join the ranks of countries with OLPC deployments and I'm looking forward to seeing how the project evolves over the coming months and years.