Hills and lakes, once victims to pollution, turning green and clean

The tea gardens here are where the retirees gather and single local opera tunes.

The lavender farms are where middle-class young couples, with women in white wedding gowns, pose for French-flavored wedding shots.

They don't want to remember that the underneath used to be one of the ugliest quarries from the '70s through the '90s.

The city government of Wuxi began refilling the stone pits in Junzhang Hill in 2005, initiating Wuxi's largest ecological restoration program. The once-wounded hillsides are now repaired and are covered by lush plants.

The Changguangxi wetland, at the foot of Junzhang Hill, is another beneficiary of the government's restoration project.

The 80-hectare wetland, a canal dug during the Three Kingdom period (AD220-280) connecting Lihu Lake in the north and Taihu Lake in the south, had become seriously polluted by industrial wastewater over many decades.

Now the wetland is a 300-hectare park with hundreds of varieties of plants, fish and birds.