Bayi Town
Lying on the bank of the Niyang River, Bayi Town is the administrative seat of Nyingchi, located 406 kilometers east of Lhasa.As a developing industrial city in eastern Tibet, it is the site of the Nyang River flows south of the town. Bayi town used to be a a small town with a wool mill, a power plant, a timber mill, a paper mill, a building material factory and other factories, as well as a hospital, a school and a bank. Now the formerly sparsely populated small town has become a thriving new town in the forest zone .
Bayi Town has an advantageous location, with transport facilities to Chengdu in the east, Shannan in the south and Lhasa in the north. The trucks shuttling along the Sichuan-Tibetan Highway carry to Bayi Town fashionable domestic appliances, dresses and other goods, while farmers and herdsmen from adjacent counties such as Gongbo'gyamda, Medog, Bome, Mainling and Nang sell pulu, jewelry, Tibetan knives, kardian and other local handicrafts in the town streets. Strolling in the streets and alleys of Bayi Town, one can see many tall buildings, shops with a great variety of goods, and bustling markets, and feel the town's prosperity. Roads paved with oval stones have been replaced by seven main streets, such as Guangdong Road, Fujian Road, Zhuhai Road, and Hong Kong Pedestrians' Road, Xiamen Square and Zhujiang Market. The drainageways, street lamps, communications lines, green streets and parks have all been renovated. In recent years, over 110,000 square meters of buildings have been constructed. The hotels, department stores, restaurands travel agencies, and places of amusement are each more impressive than the other. Bayi Town has an active night life; the town is forging ahead toward a clean, tidy, garden-like city with green vegetation year-round and flowers that blossom for three seasons.
With abundant rain and a pleasant climate, the town is surrounded by green mountains. Around the town are many sites of interest. Among the most famous are the "Waterfall in summer and Ice in winter," "Rijimuco Lake," and "Bayi Forest of Great Cypresses." The most impressive is the forest of Tibetan cypresses of about 10 hectares at the Bagyai Village in Nyingchi County. The average height of these cypresses is 30 meters, about one meter wide, with a canopy density of 50 percent. The largest, called "the greatest cypress in China," is over 50 meters tall, 5.8 meters wide and about 2,500 years old. In the Bamna Village stands an old mulberry tree of over 1,600 years old. Being 7.04 meters high and over 13 meters wide, it is called the "King of Mulberries."