Shanghe, China: A small town floating on hot springs

　　As oneof the 100 “thousand-year-old counties”, Shanghe county isannounced by the United Nations Geographical Names Committee. Ecology, hot spring, Yangko and flowers are the four most eye-catching business cardsof Shanghe, especially geothermal resources, which covers98.6% of the county’s area and 46.6% of the geothermal area of Jinan city. It is the largest geothermal storage area in north China. Therefore, Shanghe is known as a small town floating on the hot spring.

　　The geothermal reserves of Shanghe county are 25.6 billion cubic meters and 17.9 billion cubic meters can be mined. It is shallow and easy to be mined. The wellhead water temperature is between 58 and 62 degrees Celsius, and it is rich in strontium, metasilic acid, fluorine, iodine and other more than 40 kinds of trace elements beneficial to human health.

　　In recent years, Shanghe county has continuously developed the "hot spring +" model. It combines the hot spring withcultural tourism industries. With the combination ofbuildinga high-quality countywithrural tourism, farm music, e-commerce, flower planting and other chains, it developsleisure, fruit picking, sightseeing and other forms of business, createsa global tourism environment. The slogan “Shanghe’ hot springwarmsspring city” becomespopular, and “Climbing Mount Tai, touringJinan, and then to Shanghe hot springs”,also become a new highlight of Shandong tourism. It hascombined thehot spring and health industry, which relieson hot spring health industrial park, Qilu health food industrial park and other carriers to develop hot spring vacation as well asother business forms. The second phase of hot spring base project has been put into use, and Spert Group has become the first enterprise in the county with annual sales revenue of more than 4 billion yuan, Meanwhile, after putting all into operation, Shandong HongriPharmaceutical Industry projectsreacheda variety of single Chinese herbal medicine extraction capacity of10,000 tons, to further help the provincial capital biomedicine and nutrition and health 100 billion industrial cluster bigger and stronger.The combination of hot spring and characteristic agriculture. Through recyclinggeothermal energy in the same layer, adopting the form of "geothermal + light source + flowers + vegetables", introducing and cultivating high-end flowers, high-end vegetables and Chinese herbs, the county’s flower planting area reaches 1.5 million square meters, the annual output value of flower seedlings reaches 2 billion yuan, and the annual alternative coal reaches28,000 tons. All in all, the brand of “Shanghe hot spring and flowers” is becoming more and more popular.