Hosted by three local agricultural cooperatives, Antong town’s fifth Chinese flowering crabapple admiring festival kicked off at a 66.7-hectare Haitang Park on Feb. 11.

The event comprises art performances, souvenir shopping, flower trade show, and potted landscape auction, organized with the aim to boost flower admiring and sightseeing as drivers to economic growth.

Taking place at the beginning of the year, it serves as the prelude to a full year of tourism campaigns at the scenic town in Dujiangyan city, western Sichuan.

Anlong town is known as the birthplace of Sichuan-style miniascape, a craft which has been designated as a national intangible cultural heritage. Its prolonged history of cultivation of Chinese flowering crabapple, or Malus spectabilis, dates back to Tang Dynasty (618-907).