The Lijiang Alpine Botanical Garden, believed the highest botanical garden in the world, has opened in Lijiang of southwest China's Yunnan Province.

The botanical garden was built jointly by China and Britain under a contract signed between the Edinburgh Royal Botanical Garden and the Kunming Plant Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in May 2000.

The botanical garden, which has taken shape after a five-year construction, will be turned into an alpine germ bank in five years.

The Lijiang Alpine Botanical Garden covers an area of 279 hectares at a location approximate 24 km from the ancient city of Lijiang with an elevation ranking from 2,680 meters to 4,300 meters. Its field station, built with 1.23 million yuan (US$148,190) provided by the British side, will be a laboratory for studying biodiversity at the Hengduan Mountains and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Lijiang was selected as the site for the garden as it is one of the world's top 10 regions for biodiversity research and one of the three seed plant centers in China. According to a field survey conducted by the Kunming Plant Research Institute, the snow-capped Yulong (Jade Dragon) Mountains, the central scenic attraction in the Lijiang area, alone has 3,200 kinds of plants in 785 categories. The plant species in the garden are expected to exceed 4,000 in a matter of 10 to 15 years.

(Xinhua News Agency January 28, 2005)