During the annual Spring Festival vacation, Southern China's Hainan Island welcomes its busiest tourist season. Xinglong, which is located between Hainan Province's capital Haikou and the famous coastal city Sanya, always attracts tourists with its hot spring and Indonesian-influenced culture.

This year, tourists will have a new site to see in Xinglong - the Bangka Horticulture Expo Square.

Luo Deshan, founder of the site, was born in the Bangka island of Indonesia. Like many overseas Chinese returning home, Luo settled in Hainan in the 1950s. To remember his life in Indonesia, Luo named the place "Bangka."

What makes the Bangka Horticulture Expo Square special is its exhibition hall of root art, claimed to be the largest of its kind in China. Occupying over 4,000 square metres, the hall presents hundreds of works of the traditional art form in China which makes use of the roots of dead trees.

Some of the works are root sculptures, while the others are simply natural tree-roots, which often display unique artistic quality through their texture and structure.

The root art, which dates back to primitive society, is considered a joint work of man and nature.

On entering the hall, you see a large and complete root of the Suanzhi tree (Dalbergia cochinchinensis), which looks like a big screen or a peacock spreading its tail. Abstract or concrete, the various works in the hall take one into a world of imagination.

The materials of the exhibits in the expo square are mostly from the tree-roots dug out from the Sun River in Xinglong.

In the early 1990s, a real-estate developer dug out some old roots in the process of construction. He kept them because of their rare big sizes and old ages. Later his business went bankrupt, and he had to get rid of them.

Luo bought those roots and was inspired to open a hall to exhibit works of root art. He spent a lot of time looking for old tree-roots in the Sun River, and dug out tree-roots from water and dirt.

Now Luo has collected more than 1,000 large-scale tree-roots, including roots of such rare trees like Huali (Ormosia henryi), Polei (Hopea hainanensis) and Zijing (Madhuca hainanensis).

Many of the tree-roots in the exhibition were left by the trees that had been cut down in the forest. "I want to build the Bangka Horticulture Expo Square into not only a tourist site, but also a base of ecological education," said Luo.

While the root art works remind people to protect the forests, outside the exhibition hall are planted various tropical trees and flowers.

The expo square, which opened on Tuesday, adds one more highlight to tourists staying in Hainan.

Source: China Daily