A Study on the Spatial Relationship between Rural Tourist Destination and Large Cities in China

Abstract

The paper, with the rural tourist destination as study object, selects 216 distinctive tourist towns (villages) in China as the study sample, explores their spatial relationship with the cities and then sums up the characteristics and regular patterns. Firstly, the paper makes classification of all the tourist towns (villages) based on differences in their tourism resources, divides all the tourist towns (villages) into three types: natural type, cultural type and the integrated type. Secondly, it selects large cities whose population is over 500 thousand as urban samples. By means of GIS mapping analysis tools, quantitative analysis method and other methods, the author makes an analysis of the spatial relationship between distinctive tourist towns (villages) and large cities in the combination of qualitative and quantitative. The result shows that the average Euclidean distance of cultural type tourist towns (villages) to the large urban centers is minimum , the average Euclidean distance of natural type tourist towns (villages) to the large urban centers is maximum ,while the integrated type tourist towns (villages) is the middle between the first two. 93.06% distinctive tourist towns (villages) are scattered within 300 kilometers in Euclidean distance from large urban centers. They are concentrated within 20-40 kilometers (peri-urban areas) and 100-200 kilometers (big cities outlying areas) in Euclidean distance from large city centers. The larger the city is, the more surrounding distinctive tourist towns (villages) the city has.