A 3 Billion Yuan Zoo in the Wrong Place Tests a Struggling Park

Lianyungang, a coastal city in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, has approved a zoo that will not sit in the city centre. The Xiyou Lingshou, or Journey to the West Spirit Beast, zoo will rise inside the grounds of the city’s garden exposition park, a 30 billion yuan complex that opened last year. The new zoo covers 89 mu — roughly 5.9 hectares — and costs less than 300 million yuan, about $42 million. City officials describe the plan as using a small sum to revive a large asset.

The case for the zoo rests on a painfully visible problem. On public holidays, fireworks at the garden park pulled crowds from across the city. On ordinary weekdays, the park struggles to draw more than 200 visitors a day, and the exhibition gardens are so empty that, as one local account put it, you can hear the wind. A zoo, the argument goes, gives families a reason to come on a Tuesday.

The sceptics have a simpler arithmetic. The park already cost more than 30 billion yuan, and it has not filled its grounds. Adding 300 million yuan to a site that cannot sustain itself, they argue, is less a rescue than another bucket thrown into a dry well. The debate in local comment threads split cleanly: one camp saw a smart, low-cost way to activate a stranded asset, the other saw a second subsidy for a park that never found its audience.

Both readings miss the geography. The site sits far from the urban core, in a district that was chosen for a national garden expo and then had to find a second life once the expo ended. Zoos are one of the few attractions that can pull families across that distance, because children do not care how long the drive is. The risk is that the zoo becomes a holiday-only destination, repeating the park’s own pattern: packed on a festival day, silent on a Wednesday.

The naming leans on a familiar local asset. Lianyungang is closely associated with Journey to the West, the classic novel whose hero, the Monkey King, is said to have been born on a mountain in the region. Calling the zoo after the story’s spirit beasts is a bid to turn a literary brand into a ticket-buying reason, and it gives the project a marketing hook that a generic city zoo would lack.

China has spent the past decade building large cultural and exhibition complexes, and a growing number now face the same question: what happens after the opening ceremony. Some have been converted into wedding venues, sports facilities or, as here, animal parks. The pattern is not unique to Lianyungang, but the numbers make it unusually legible — a site built for a national event, now testing whether a 300 million yuan addition can change its weekday fortunes.

The near-term signal will be the zoo’s first ordinary week. If the park can hold weekday traffic above its current trickle once the animals arrive, the cheap-rescue theory wins a point. If the crowds still appear only on holidays, the 30 billion yuan question will simply have a new exhibit.