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)