Zou Zijing, the mayor of Guangyuan in Sichuan, discussed the city’s environment-friendly development strategy, centering wellness tourism, during an interview on March 17.

Boasting well-preserved natural environment, the city has built its development strategies around green economy, which in turn, benefits the environment protection efforts.

Industries such as food and beverage and biomedicine are supported for they create less burden on the environment. Organic food production has become the priority of agricultural development.

While in the service sector, eco and wellness tourism has been attached with the most importance because, according to Zou, the city enjoys favorable conditions for developing the industry.

With a forest coverage of 56.2 percent, Guangyuan has an abundance of clear water and verdant mountains and hills across the 16,300 square kilometers of land. It also boasts large amounts of quality water resources at major rivers. 95 percent of the farmland are certified as pollution-free soils. The temperatures change within a comfortable range all year round. All these present a pleasing environment for short stays and long-term residences both.

Located at the geometrical center of four major cities of Chengdu, Chongqing, Xi’an and Lanzhou in Sichuan and neighboring regions, Guangyuan has been built into a regional transportation hub with four railways and three expressways converging in the city, offering better accessibility to its rich tourism resources, including scenic sites and cultural relic sites of nation level, and the Tangjiahe nature reserve in Qingchuan county that protects giant panda and its habitat as well as other rare species of animals and plants.

The 3,000-year-old road accessibility system that links Sichuan to the outside world through antient times runs through various parts of the prefecture-level city including ancient towns in Zhaohua and Jiange.

Of the total 450 kilometers’ ancient road path within the province, the 270 kilometers’ section in Guangyuan is best preserved conserving most cultural elements, including the suspending plank roads hugging cliff faces and the 13,000 ancient cypresses casting cool shade over a part winding through the Jianmen Mountains.

Ruling the Sichuan region i the Three Kingdoms period (220-280), the Shu Dynasty (221-263) was another prominent source for historic relics spread across Guangyuan.

Thanks to the unspoiled natural environment, especially the trace element-rich soil, a rich variety of quality agricultural products, including 27 under protection of the China Geographical Indication system, and traditional Chinese medicinal materials are growing in Guangyuan, providing quality food resources and materials for holistic health treatments.

The small prefecture of 500,000 urban residents owns four hospitals of the highest level in China’s classification system. It also established close collaborations with top healthcare institutions in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan and Beijing to provide elite medical services.

Guangyuan also made great efforts to improve basic education services. The city has recently shifted the trend of locals arranging for children to go to school elsewhere and started to attract students from other cities, some outside of Sichuan. This is supposed to be good news for those thinking about rather long-term stays in Guangyuan, either for a change of environment for the family or entailed by a job transfer.

Combining these aspects, Zou concluded that Guangyuan has a bright prospect for developing eco and wellness tourism in the coming years.

He explained that the city has well thought out plans for the development of the wellness tourism industry as part of its macrocosm tourism development strategy.

They have been pushing for the integration of wellness tourism and other industry sectors including agriculture.

The city’s infrastructure construction and urban planning have been coordinated to match tourism development demands. Efforts have also been made to improve tourism and related resources, from dining, accommodation, to transportation, shopping, and entertainment.

Major projects attracting heavy investments have been introduced, seven of which worth more than 3 billion yuan. Industry heavyweights such as Wanda Group, Overseas Chinese Town, and China CYTS Tours have set up shops in Guangyuan.

However, the beautiful Guangyuan with rich tourism resources and immaculate natural environment is still rather unknown to the rest of the country, let alone the world. So the city plans to allot more resources to the publicity efforts in a bid to raise its popularity among travel lovers worldwide.