A forest park with its own street: how Chashan Zhuhai is run

Chashan Zhuhai, the Tea Mountain and Bamboo Sea, is the national forest park held by the Jishan forest farm in northern Yongchuan, and the district's best-known scenic place. It is a 4A tourist area and it is where House of Flying Daggers was filmed, which is the kind of fact that tells you what the place looks like: tall stems, a shaded floor, the light broken into columns. Yongchuan names tea, bamboo and stone as its three distinctive resources, and the park is where the first two grow together. The district's forest coverage stands at 51 per cent.

In 2009 the park became an administrative unit as well. Chashan Zhuhai street was established on 25 June that year, put together from parts of five towns and subdistricts, and it was set up under a three-in-one arrangement in which the street, the scenic area management committee and the tourism company run as one body. The street covers 96.6 square kilometres, about 34 of them state forest farm and other forest land. The arrangement is unusual but logical: a place whose business is visitors needs a government that can decide at the speed of a booking, and a company that can book.

The park is one item in a visitor economy the district counts closely. In 2021 Yongchuan received 26.36 million visitors and took 18.56 billion yuan in tourism revenue; its theme park, Lehua Ledu, alone took 99.92 million yuan in tickets. The district stages an international tea culture festival every year, and the park is its permanent argument: a working forest farm that also receives visitors, with the tea hills and the bamboo standing in the same 96.6 square kilometres. For a district whose older identity was a collection point for goods moving along the Yangtze, the shift is recent and deliberate, and it runs on the same roads.