Lu'An
A 4.4-million-person Dabie Mountain city whose six reservoirs supply Hefei's drinking water — creating a development trap where ecological preservation constrains industrial growth.
Hefei — population exceeding 10 million, GDP over ¥1.35 trillion — is one of China's fastest-growing provincial capitals, and it drinks Lu'an's water. More than 320 million cubic metres flow annually from the Meishan and Xianghongdian reservoirs in Lu'an's Dabie Mountains to downstream cities. The Pishihang Irrigation District, one of China's three largest irrigation systems, channels Lu'an's mountain water across 11 million mu of farmland and into the taps of Hefei, Huainan, and Lu'an itself. Lu'an, in western Anhui province, is a city of 4.4 million people whose most valuable export is invisible.
The Wikipedia entry focuses on Lu'an Guapian (六安瓜片), one of China's top ten green teas, grown in misty Dabie Mountain elevations above 1,000 metres. The tea matters, but the water matters more. Six major reservoirs hold 7 billion cubic metres of Class II water — the national standard for centralised drinking-water sources — making Lu'an's watershed one of eastern China's critical freshwater reserves. This creates a development trap: heavy industrialisation would contaminate the water that downstream cities depend on. Lu'an's per capita GDP sits at roughly 63% of Anhui's provincial average, and the constraint is not lack of resources but the obligation to preserve them.
Lu'an functions as a source habitat in the ecological sense — exporting water, ecological services, and agricultural output to a downstream sink (Hefei) that consumes them to fuel its own growth. The city cannot industrialise heavily without degrading the system it sustains.
Beavers engineer watersheds by building dams that store water, control flow, and create habitats that other species depend on. Lu'an's six reservoirs and extensive mountain forest cover perform the same function at prefecture scale — retaining, filtering, and releasing water that sustains an entire regional economy. The Huoqiu Iron Mine holds over 2.5 billion tons of proven reserves, ranking first in East China, yet extraction is constrained by the same watershed logic. Since 2014, Anhui has operated an ecological compensation mechanism that pays upstream counties like Jinzhai nearly ¥300 million for maintaining water quality — an attempt to price the externality. The resource allocation question is stark: Lu'an sacrifices industrial growth so that Hefei can drink, and the compensation funds are the system's imperfect attempt at interdependence rather than extraction.