With the 9th China (Beijing) International Garden Expo around the corner, Beijing cannot wait to unveil a splendid garden park to the world which sprouted up entirely out of a mucky landfill site in merely three years.

The expo park, located along the western bank of the Yongding River in Fengtai District, was formerly a barren field featuring a 140-hectare construction waste landfill formed in the 1980s, according to Zhang Jianguo, vice mayor of Fengtai.

"More than 2,000 junkmen used to gather in this area, a garbage dump derived from a huge pit shaped due to unregulated sand quarrying on the dried-up course of the Yongding River during the 1980s and 1990s," Zhang recalled.

It was once a place notorious for its horrible environment.

Yet now, it has been turned into an international garden covering a total area of 513 hectares, including a vast land space of 267 hectares showcasing a kaleidoscope of 128 delicate gardens from home and abroad, as well as a picturesque waterscape spanning some 246 hectares. Its size is almost double that of the Summer Palace.

More than 12 million plants and flora are grown here to form 147 hectares of green area. A 40-hectare wetland, which can reclaim 80,000 cubic meters of waste water per day, will help purify the water used inside the park and restore the ecological green belt of the Yongding River, known as the city's mother river.

It's the first time China has constructed a garden park this vast through ecological restoration.

Most remarkably, the site of the Splendid Vally (Jinxiu Valley), formerly a 30-meter-deep large sand pit covering 20 hectares of land area, has been transformed into a fairyland-like sunken garden which integrates a magnificent artificial waterfall with amazing landscapes amid a green valley dotted with various flowers.

The valley is highly touted for embodying the expo's eco-concept of "Turn the foul and rotten into the rare and ethereal." It was exactly this unique concept of turning bad into good through ecological rehabilitation that persuaded the jury panel into designating Changxindian Town, where the park is located, as the site for holding the 2013 Expo back in 2009.

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