Waterside pavilions, fragrant grass, trees and flowers, and leisure pedestrians are the scenes you can see in today’s Xihe beach park. You can hardly imagine that it was used to be a tailing mine area.

Xihe locates in Suxian district, Chenzhou city which abounds in over 100 kinds of rich mineral resources. In the period of great prosperity of mining economy, there were 423 mining enterprises and 245 beneficiation firms gathered in the upstream of Xihe.

As we can see from the old photos exhibited in the new Xihe beach park, it was covered with mining, beneficiation firms, waste rocks, and tailings. Due to small-scale of the enterprises and their poor technologies, more than 20 million tons of sewage were discharged in the river directly and10 millions of tailings and rocks were cumulated in the river.

As it is described by one of the villagers who has lived there for about 52 years that people were not willing to live nearby after the pollution caused by the mining, because no matter it is sunny or rainy, there was a mass situation that people hardly can bare.

Chenzhou city was famous for its abundant mine resources and prosperous mining industries. However, it suffered a lot for the damage to environment. The situation mentioned above was one of the classic scenes of its influence.

Changes of Xihe took place from 4 years ago. Upstream mining companies were integrated, shut down, rectified and reformed in accordance with relative regulations. In two years, 423 mining enterprises were integrated to be 27 and 245 beneficiations were integrated to be 28. Besides, the ecological restoration work was carried out at the same time with the purpose of increasing 4% forest coverage of this heavy polluted area within 2 years.

The story does not end there. In March, 2011, 100 million yuan was invested on the construction of a park on one bank of Xihe, which was used to a tailing concentration area. Some sea sands were shipped from Hainan province and were used to build beach volleyball fields and football fields. Because of these beach constructions, the park was named as Xihe beach park. When travelling in the park, reporters were encountered with many kindergarten kids. “It is definitely the most popular park in Chenzhou city every weekend.”- He Luchuan, secretary of Suxian district Party Committee said proudly.

The national level export processing zone of Chenzhou was located on the opposite bank of Xihe beach park. Now, a new wetland park with about 360 million yuan investment is under construction, and the first phase has been nearly finished. Just walking in the first phase site, visitors can fully enjoy its natural viewings. It was amazed to learn from the Deputy Director of the processing zone-Duan Beicheng that the wetland park would be extended for 20kms to the north, and be facilitated with bike lanes running through the entire park, which would become a favorite cycling leisure place for Chenzhou people. With the improvement of ecological condition, the land becomes much more valuable.

Green banks are together with clearer water. According to the water quality monitoring data, heavy metal pollution indexes decreased sharply after the remediation, some even declined more than 100 times. The stories which are similar to Xihe beach park keep happening in Chenzhou city. Xihe river banks, the most serious polluted areas, are one of the regions with highest density of parks in Chenzhou city.

In recent years, Chenzhou has been committed to the economy transformation and green development. Changes for Xihe banks are just the “green” footnote of Chenzhou’s great changes. Xiang Lili- Secretary of Chenzhou Municipal Party Committee introduced that Chenzhou government would vigorously promote the city upgrading with the main target of being an ecological livable city and will try best to improve Chenzhou city to be with highest forest coverage rate & greening coverage rate and best ecological condition in Hunan province, even China.