As usual we finish our S3 Newsletter with some articles not so closely related to the business world. Specifically, this time we continue with both the list of big (but little known) Chinese cities and the list of the ten most beautiful national parks in China.
Big, yet little know cities in China
After locating Wuhan (central), Shenyang (northeast), Guiyang (southwest), Shaoxing (east), Chengdu (west), Fuzhou (southeast), Hainan Island (south), Xi’an (northwest), Nanjing (east), Kunming (southwest), Harbin (northeast), Lhasa (southwest), Changsha (south-central) and Suzhou (east) on the map, Kunming (southwest), Harbin (northeast), Lhasa (southwest), Changsha (south-central) and Suzhou (east) on the map, we turn to the southern part of the country, where we find the special administrative region of Macao.
Many readers will be familiar with Hong Kong, one of the three largest financial centres in the world, with its special administrative status in China. But not so many will know that right next door is Macau, the other city with a specific status as a former colony (in this case not British, but Portuguese). With a population of some 700,000 inhabitants, Macau is a very different case compared to all the cities we have been discovering in this thematic series.
In fact, Macau’s economy practically revolves around a single activity: casinos. It is well known that gambling is one of China’s favourite pastimes, but while the mainland drastically restricts the existence of casinos, in Macau they are allowed. And that’s pretty much all there is. There are, however, two distinct areas, with the old city (and Casino Lisboa in the picture) in the north and the island of Taipa in the south, dominated by newly built casinos.
And what’s a picture of Venice doing in an article about Asia? Well, like its Las Vegas counterpart, The Venetian Macau Hotel has real canals – and gondolas – inside the building (the blue sky in the picture is just an extremely realistic painted ceiling). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macau
The ten most beautiful national parks in China
We continue our series presenting the 10 most beautiful national parks in China (again, out of a total of 225 candidates).
In the far west of the central province of Hubei (whose capital is Wuhan) lies the Shennongjia Heritage Site. It covers some 3,250km2 and its varied landscape ranges from 498m to 3,150m above sea level, with more than 30 peaks exceeding 2,500m. Shennongjia has been a place of great scientific interest, especially for botanists, and the mountains have figured prominently in the history of botanical research.
One of the best-preserved subtropical forest ecosystems in the world, it has become the natural habitat of more than 5,000 species of rare plants and animals, such as the golden snub-nosed monkey, the Asiatic black bear, the Chinese giant salamander, etc. A real natural treasure!