A small East China salt mining city is hoping to create "the Dead Sea of China" as a tourist attraction, Zhangshu government officials confirmed Tuesday.
Visitors to the Jiangxi Province county-level city of 600,000 will be able to float on water at the salt spring resort and benefit from its therapeutic effects on insomnia, cardiovascular and skin diseases, Yida Travel Group deputy general manager Wu Liangfeng told the Global Times Tuesday.
"It will be China's first therapeutic salt spring resort," he said.
The water will be 25 percent salt, slightly lower than the 33 percent at the original Dead Sea, but five times that of a regular thermal spring.
"Salty underground water can be drawn up to fill 120 pools for visitors," Wu said. Some 3,000 tons of salt water will flow every day when the 3.17 billion yuan ($490 million), 412 hectare resort is completed.
The 1.04 billion yuan ($161 million) first phase "floating experience area" broke ground earlier this week and will soft open with a daily capacity of 15,000 to 20,000 visitors for the Chinese New Year.
The other two phases will be complete in five years, according to a statement released by the Fujian-based investors.
The resort relies heavily upon Zhangshu's 10.37 billion tons of rock salt 1,000 meters underground, the fourth-largest reserves in the country.
"Zhangshu's industries are mainly pharmaceutical, wine and salt-related traditional industries," Xiang Bin, press officer of the city government told the Global Times Tuesday, "and the city has been trying to diversify into tourism in recent years.
"We hope that by taking advantage of our natural resources, the project can help boost the tourism industry."
Yida aims to attract about 10 percent of the province's 30 million annual "red tourists" flocking to the departure points of the 1934-1936 Long March.
The 1,291 square-kilometer city is 1.5 hours' drive from Jiangxi's capital city of Nanchang, located on a tourist route connecting China's Communist revolutionary sites of Lushan Mountain, Nanchang and Jinggangshan.