Baisha Bay Seaside Park in Taizhou, East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/WeChat account: tzfb001]

Baisha Bay Seaside Park in Taizhou, East China's Zhejiang province, has become a hit destination for tourists, attracting over 60,000 visitors during this year's May Day holiday.

With its clean ocean water, swaying palm trees, and fine sand, it has been dubbed a miniature Sanya, a holiday resort city on Hainan Island.

However, Baisha Bay was once a desolate salt flat filled with marine debris and unpleasant odors. A decade ago, nearby villagers described it as "bleak and desolate".

Its transformation began in 2011, when the central government spent 12 million yuan ($1.68 million) to restore its ecology before giving an additional 43 million yuan in 2015 to accelerate the ecological restoration.

In 2019, the Baisha Bay wetland ecological restoration project received 180 million yuan in subsidies under the National Blue Bay Remediation Action Program. The project was intended to enhance the ecological functionality and stability of the Baisha Bay coastline, restore the marine ecosystem, and preserve nature.

"We have restored 3,000 mu (200 hectares) of clear sea-water lakes, created a 2.5-kilometer beach, and built a 28-hectare coastline greenway, turning Baisha Bay into a beach resort destination in the Yangtze River Delta," according to an official at the Taizhou municipal bureau of natural resources and planning.

The Baisha Bay wetland ecological restoration project was recently recognized as one of China's top 10 classic cases of marine ecological restoration. This recognition highlights its importance in China's ecological civilization construction and conservation efforts.