A medicinal botanic garden in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region has been confirmed by Guinness World Records as the largest of its kind in the world, an official of the garden said Friday.

The garden, covering 202 hectares (2.02 square kilometers), has been confirmed to contain the most varieties of medicinal plants and the largest cultivated area of medicinal plants in the world.

To date, it has saved more than 6,000 kinds of living medicinal plants (including more than 100 endangered varieties and over 30 new varieties), over 3,200 kinds of medicinal plant seeds and 100,000 medicinal plant images.

Guangxi's health department built the garden in 1959, aiming to cultivate, collect and save medicinal plants and also conduct research.

It is expected that the garden will be built into an advanced international medicinal plants conservation base and a center for traditional Chinese medicine culture and science.

Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region is one of the country's most undeveloped provinces, but known for its large variety of herbal medicines and the ethnic minority cultures of Zhuang and Yao.