China is building what it hopes will become the world's largest
botanical gardens at Shaanxi Province's Qinling Mountain.
With a 530 million yuan (US$66 million) investment from the
central government, the gardens, covering 458 square kilometers,
will house rare plants and animals both native to the region and
from around the world.
When completed, it will be four times the size of Australia's
Queensland Botanical Gardens, currently the world's largest, said
Guo Daozhong, director of the Shaanxi Provincial Forestry Resources
Administration Bureau.
"We plan to complete the project in 2008, and make the gardens a
multi-functional botanical park for scientific research, botanical
education, biodiversity conservation and eco-tourism," Guo
said.
"With a north-south span of over 40 kilometers, the gardens will
contain various eco-climates and contain 3,446 kinds of plants,
5,000 species of insects and more than 600 species of vertebrates
including rare wild animals like pandas and golden monkeys," said
Shen Maocai, director of the gardens.
The Qinling National Botanical Gardens are an enlargement of the
existing Qinling Botanical Gardens, located in central Shaanxi's
Zhouzhi County. The new gardens will range from 460 meters to 3,000
meters high and contain plains, hills and high mountains, Shen told
China Daily yesterday.
The ecologically-rich Qinling Mountain area is the watershed of
the Yangtze River Basin and the Yellow River Basin.
According to the director, the gardens will help protect all
plants growing in the mountains as well as 900 species plants from
temperate zones and 2,000 various tropical and subtropical plants
gathered here.
(China Daily October 12, 2006)