The newly-refurbished Huangshi National Mine Park, located in Huangshi City of central China's Hubei Province, used to be a century-old mine, known as Daye Iron Mine. Now it has been transformed into a cultural industrial park, a national AAAA-level scenic spot, creating a path of green development with booming industrial tourism. 

The mine site, China's first large-scale open-pit iron ore mine, has a mining history of 1,784 years, in which it created economic benefits as well as ecological ills.

The Daye Iron Mine used to be Asia's biggest opencast mine. The mouth of its pit area is as large as 150 standard football pitches, stretching over 1.08 million square meters with a depth of 444 meters. 

"This is Asia's biggest opencast mine, which is not commonly seen," said Yan Hongyong, director of the administrative office of the Huangshi National Mine Park. 

From 1890 to 2000, Daye Iron Mine produced more than 130 million tonnes of iron ore and over 320,000 tonnes of copper. 

After 1958, about 364 million tonnes of waste rocks were dumped at the mine site, covering an area of three million square meters. 

After decades of rapid economic development and resource exploitation, Huangshi was listed as a resource-exhausted city in 2009, which cast a shadow over the city's future. 

Huangshi then intensified efforts to strike a balance between economic development and ecological protection, and planted 1.2 million locust trees on rocks for ecological restoration. 

As the city sought to steer itself towards revitalizing and greening its industry, it decided to transform the mine site into a cultural park with industrial elements. The Huangshi National Mine Park has since taken on a new look. 

The combination of mine restoration and tourism development has borne fruit. On July 23, 2005, Huangshi National Mine Park became the first national mine park in Hubei Province and has become a popular scenic spot.