Xuebao: a forest park on the Daba flank

The park covers 18,408 hectares in the north of Kaizhou, and its ground runs from 460 metres to 2,626. That span is the point of the place. A single protected slope here passes through several forest belts, and the vegetation at the base of the range is mainly mid-subtropical humid evergreen broadleaf forest, the broad-leaved cover that the wet, mild winters at the edge of the Sichuan Basin allow. The park is 330 kilometres from the urban centre of Chongqing proper, far enough that it belongs to a different country from the river port. Above the farmland of the district's middle, the ground simply keeps rising until it becomes the range.

Xuebao does not stand alone on its mountain. With Hongchiba in Wuxi it occupies the southern flank of the Daba Mountains, the long range that runs along Chongqing's northern border. The Daba cuts through Sichuan, Chongqing, Shaanxi and Hubei and spans about 1,000 kilometres, belongs to the same orogenic belt as the Qinling, and divides the Yellow River basin from the Yangtze basin. Its narrow definition is about 1,300 to 2,000 metres high, and its southern slope drains into the Sichuan Basin or straight into the Yangtze by short streams. A park on that slope is a piece of a watershed, not a scenic hill.

The Daba is one of the places where the conservation argument is easy to state. Its evergreen forests are listed by the WWF among 200 ecoregions that should be a priority for conservation, and the Dabashan National Nature Reserve, in the Chongqing part of the range in Chengkou County, is one of China's national nature reserves. The dawn redwood is endemic to the Daba Shan; it was thought extinct outside California until stands were found there in the 1940s. Terraced farming is expanding in the range and the eucommia tree, a medicinal plant, is a widely planted cash crop. Xuebao is the stretch of that range Kaizhou holds as a forest park.