The original natural beauty of Yintan beach in coastal Beihai city is, however, expected to return very soon after the last three buildings on the beach were reduced to rubble on Monday.

Sited in the southern part of Beihai, the 24-km coastal area, three km wide at most, is famous for its fine white sand, long level beach, calm and clean water, and absence of sharks.

More than 3.5 million tourists from China and overseas visit Yintan Beach each year.

When it was first developed in the early 1990s, several dozen buildings sprang up in the beach area in a period of no more than a year.

In recent years, visitors have found a host of primitive plants have been missing, soil erosion has accelerated, and the sand is turning black and beach becomes so flat and dull.

Environmentalists attributed this situation to the encroaching constructions and public facilities which have adversely affected the beach's self-cleansing ability and caused sand quality and quantity to deteriorate.

In 2002, the Beihai city government launched a project to demolish all 33 buildings and other structures in the beach area to restore its unique, vivid natural beauty.

China boasts a wealth of beautiful natural areas which attract rising numbers of tourists. Almost all the scenic destinations face the problem that the increasing presence of facilities is seriously damaging the environment.

China's construction and tourism departments across the board have come to realize it is high time to stop random development in scenic areas.

Guangxi drafted measures to regulate building in scenic areas as long as four years ago. They ban the construction of any kind of commercial facility such as hotels, rest houses and nursing homes in the region's scenic reserves.

Hunan province, in central-south China, plans to spend one billion yuan (120 million US dollars) pulling down all buildings with an area of 340,000 square meters in the prestigious Zhangjiajie reserve at the Wulingyuan scenic area, which is on the World Natural Heritage list. The investment is several times the total income the scenic area has earned over the last couple of years.

Also joining efforts to restore natural beauty and improve the environment in scenic areas are east China's Jiangxi province and Sichuan province in the southwest. The former has demolished buildings worth 20 million yuan (2.4 million US dollars) in the renowned Lushan Mountain scenic area and the latter invested nearly 100 million yuan (12 million US dollars) on improving the environment at Mt Emei.

Although the booming tourism industry has adversely impacted on the natural environment in China's scenic areas, experts noted, more and more people have recast their relations with nature and that was good for benign development in natural scenic zones.

Beihai city, for instance, aims to build the wonderful Yintan Beach into a tourism attraction highlighting ecological protection, where people can relax or indulge in leisurely recreational and sporting activities.

(People's Daily January 10, 2003)