Introduction:
Located at the mouth of the Yangtze River, the city of Nantong in the southeast of Jiangsu Province is blessed with an advantageous geographical location connecting the country’s “busiest river” and the “gold coast” of the Yellow Sea. With neither majestic mountains nor striking rocks, the city has a quiet charm and is adorned by lush green vegetation and a meandering moat around its old town.
Main body:
Zhouji Green Expo Park
The Zhouji Green Expo Park houses some of the world’s rarest plants and each unique plant has its own fascinating story. The cartoon cactus sculpture at the entrance is always the first to attract the attention of young visitors. But more eye-catching is a giant globe nearby surrounded by a fountain dancing gaily to the music, like a “curtain” waiting to rise for a botanical carnival.
The Tropical Rainforest Pavilion will bring you instantly to the Amazon jungle with its gurgling stream and leafy trees. In another glass greenhouse, you will have the opportunity to enjoy dozens of tropical fruit trees while a Chinese-style garden presents a mass of almost all the desert plants worldwide … Each greenhouse in the park presents a brave new world. But if you go outside, you will see terraces of flowers blaze with color and a cloud of fine spray coming up from the waterfall. You may also saunter to a quiet valley gay with fragrant blossoms or a vast grassland under the azure sky … Every step of the journey leads to an intriguing change of scene.
Although Nantong is in the northern hemisphere, the Zhouji Green Expo Park applies modern wisdom to bring the splendor from every corner of the globe to the hustle and bustle of a city and offers a tranquil botanical paradise for hectic lives.
Seyuan Garden
Seyuan Garden is the largest botanical garden in Nantong with more than 10,000 trees of over 200 rare species, including the dove-tree and the Taiwania. As a result, Seyuan has good air quality with high density of negative ions and has become a natural “oxygen bar” in the city.
Besides, Seyuan is also where Zhang Jian (1853-1926), a zhuangyuan (the scholar who achieved the highest score in the imperial examination) in the late Qing dynasty (1636-1912), was buried. Having founded several schools and factories in Nantong, Zhang Jian upheld the notion of saving the nation with modern industries and fostered the development of modern Chinese industry and education. Moreover, realizing the importance of trees to a city, he mobilized his students to plant an experimental forest and even encouraged the country to start to observe Arbor Day. The people of Nantong inherit Zhang Jian’s ecological ideas and transform Seyuan into a place for voluntary tree planting. Every year after the Tomb-Sweeping Day (the 15th day from the Spring Equinox), locals would go to Seyuan to plant saplings in expectation of a large stretch of forest to come.
