Huocheng to open lavender tourism festival

Huocheng county in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region will hold the Fifth Huocheng Lavender Tourism Festival on June 13-15.

The festival's press conference was held in Urumqi on April 19. Cui Rongguo, the county's vice Party chief and Li Xiyu, director of the county's publicity department, delivered speeches at the conference.

Themed on "A Romantic Trip in Fragrant Huocheng", the festival is aimed at promoting Huocheng's tourism and developing the lavender industry, according to Cui.

Cui highlighted that this year's Huocheng Lavender Tourism Festival will also publicize history and folk culture.

According to Li Xiyu, Huocheng will improve the infrastructure in its scenic spots and try to enrich its lavender tourism projects this year. Huocheng's princess lavender garden, a national 4A tourist attraction, occupies an area of 20 hectares and is set to increase the amount of tourist interaction in 2015. So far, the garden is China's first theme park to display the culture of lavender and is the first lavender base for taking wedding photos in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

The county is looking to complete a princess lavender garden museum, which will contain various specimens, products, literature and pictures of different lavender varieties. A lavender park, covering 266 hectares of land, will also be built.

Li said that Huocheng has restructured its economy in recent years and that the government has strengthened its efforts in developing its tourism.

Huocheng is home to China's biggest lavender-planting base and is located at the same latitude as world-renowned lavender planting bases such as Provence in France and Hokkaido in Japan. This gives the county similar climatic conditions and makes it the third largest lavender planting base in the world after Provence and Furano in Japan.

So far, Huocheng contains more than 95 percent of China's lavender planting areas. The county has developed a lavender industry that sells various lavender products around the world, including lavender dried flower, sachet and essential oil.

Edited by Jacob Hooson