By WANG NAN and XIAO LIN

Brooding volcanos.

A century ago, Briton George Forest visited Gaoligong Mountain, never dreaming he would find such a green heaven here. In almost 30 years of plant hunting, Forest contributed more than 100,000 herbaceous specimens to the British Museum, drawing the world attention to this remote and wild gene treasury on China's southwestern border.

On the left side of this "heaven," the steep Gaoligong Mountain and cliffs alongside the Nujiang River form a prodigious semi-tropical valley landscape. Beyond the mountain is an important town in Southwest China - Tengchong.

A statue of Xu Xiake (1587-1641) greets visitors to green mountain encircled Tengchong. There are several avenues across the city, lined with trees and contemporary buildings. A clear river runs right through the city.

Three hundred and sixty years ago, Xu Xiake marked several places on the map that he pledged to visit, one of which was Tengchong. Xu was impressed with Tengchong, despite its remote location, because of its rich and thriving nature.

Tengchong began to flourish in 1445, and has since become a prosperous commercial port. Tengchong is the last station on the Southwest Silk Road linking South Asia and West Asia. It is also an important commercial port to Burma, India and Pakistan. According Burmese British Commerce Chamber statistics published, the total amount of Tengchong's imports and exports in 1826 reached more than one million pounds. Until 1837, the then sole treaty port of Guangzhou had just 0.9 million pounds worth of imported British goods, of which opium took a large portion. Britain established a consulate in Tengchong in 1899, while the Qing government established the Tengchong-Vietnam customs in 1902. Tengchong's commercial environment has been a source of many business elites, and it gave rise to Heshun - the biggest area In Southwest China inhabited by returned overseas Chinese and their relatives.. Heshun is a cultural hotspot; the city is home to China's earliest and biggest village library as well as politicians Li Genyuan and Ai Siqi.

Tengchong shares a 148-kilometer border with Myanmar, and is closest to that country's emerald mines. As early as the Song and Yuan Dynasties, Tengchong was the first place in the world to process emerald. Before the 1950s, it was the biggest distributing, trade and processing center of Myanmar gems. Emeralds from Tengchong are so famous that the city is known as "Emerald city."

Border trade is one of its "golden" passagesand thrived in the 1990s. Ninety percent of China's total precious stones pass through Tengchong customs, exchange quantities reaching hundreds of thousands of kilograms.

Natural wonders are also abundant in Tengchong. China's sole urban waterfall is located in the city, it has 88 hot springs containing therapeutic benefits and within an area of 5,854 square kilometers are 99 volcanoes.

Wang Caichun, secretary of the county CPC committee, says that Tengchong occupied an area of only 7.12 square kilometers five years ago, but that since 1998, the government has invested 1.063 billion yuan on urban renovation and construction.

Heshun Library.

Tengchong's rich culture and history is important capital. "Culture is the soul of a city," says Wang. Tengchong has invested 100 million yuan in culture, having built a National Folk Art Performance Center, a Tengchong-Vietnam Square and several historical residences. The surrounding environment has also been restored and improved.

"Tengchong pays attention to long-term city construction," said Wang. "We stick to scientific city planning each time we take on a large-scale project. During the past five years, 160 units and 3,000 households have been relocated. At the beginning, residents couldn't understand or accept this. But as the city became more and more beautiful, the trade and tourism industries flourished. As people drew benefit from it, they changed their minds and became to support the resettlement project."

In the coming years, Tengchong will attach great importance to six key projects: opening an international road from the NO. 4 China-Myanmar South boundary marker to Myitkyina, Myanmar; building the Tengchong Tuofeng Airport; developing hydropower on the Binlang River; constructing two non-state-owned industrial parks; and building Tengchong into a national first-class tourist city.