CITY GUIDE >Sightseeing
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CITY GUIDE >Sightseeing
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Tapestry of colors
By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-27 09:33
"Panjin is laid out in five colors," say Huang Yong, director of the coastal city's information center. There's the aquamarine blue of the shallow waters of Liaohe River, pouring into Bohai Sea. And miles of carmine red Suaeda salsa, a kind of grass, growing on the mud flat jutting into the waters. The intense growth of reeds on the marshes girdling the city comes in various shades of a balmy forest green. Underneath this rippling expanse lie the reserves of black oil, to which Panjin, primarily a mining town in Northeast China's Liaoning province, owes its recent development. And then there is the never-ending golden yellow stretch of ripe paddy, the source of the fine and fragrant Panjin rice, sought after all over China. One could keep adding to the color palate the muddy earth on which crawling crabs camouflage themselves with ease, orange clusters of hydraulic drilling machines punctuating the green reedy expanse, the illimitable gray-green rows of apartment blocks awaiting possession.
At the Second International Wetland Traveling Week of Panjin, city mayor Sun Guoxiang sounds highly optimistic about Panjin's tourism potential. "Panjin's oilfields sustained the city in the past two decades, but in the future tourism is going to be its major industry," he says. Among the projects in the pipeline is the mega-buck water city, a 110-sq-km area, to be developed largely on artificial land along the mouth of the Daliao River on the Bohai coast, on the lines of Amsterdam. But until this futuristic financial hub on the water, which will have two universities and state-of-the-art entertainment complexes, is completed in 2010, there's no dearth of tourist attractions in Panjin. |
