A landscape is therapeutic when safety, accessibility, sensory richness, and biodiversity come together with the ways people can actually experience the place. That is the view of FTHub-certified Forest Bathing Guide and Capacity Building & Content Manager Betty Fang, who has worked with FTHub Trainer Alex Gesse to bring Forest Bathing and Forest Therapy training to China. Here she explains how that view shaped a new therapeutic landscape at Wang Gang Ping, a mountain landscape in Sichuan facing Mount Gongga.
“Even this place, it’s natural, it’s beautiful, it’s not therapeutic if people cannot safely and easily experience it.”
Betty Fang
The story of FTHub’s work in China didn’t begin with a trail, but with training. Around three years ago, she and FTHub Executive Director Alex Gesse began bringing FTHub’s professional Forest Bathing and Forest Therapy training to China. The first step was to introduce the methodology and build a local network of practitioners. The next step was to translate the materials and ideas into a Chinese context.
Then something changed. As Forest Bathing became better known, scenic destinations and landscape owners began approaching FTHub with a different question. Beyond how to train people to guide Forest Bathing, they wanted to know how to create landscapes that are intentionally designed to support therapeutic experiences. That question eventually led to Wang Gang Ping, a mountain landscape in Sichuan facing Mount Gongga, and to the development of a new therapeutic landscape there.
The project also grew through a network of local partners. Betty highlights Ben Luo, FTHub’s partner in China, who helped connect FTHub with universities, institutes, and scenic sites, as well as Professor Yang from Trang University, who brought expertise from the tourism and academic sectors. Together with the Wang Gang ing team, their involvement helped turn the idea of a therapeutic landscape into reality.
The conversation starts when landscape owners begin asking how their destinations can offer more valuable experiences. Betty describes the question this way: “How can they make the landscape more suitable for a therapeutic or Forest Bathing experience?” The answer, she argues, is that a therapeutic landscape needs to be considered as a whole.
From Training to Landscape Design
FTHub’s early work in China focused on professional education. But Betty soon discovered that introducing a structured methodology also meant explaining what Forest Bathing actually is, because the concept was not always immediately understood. “Many of them never heard about Forest Bathing before,” she says. Some people associated it with hiking, exercise in the forest, or nature education. Others had already experienced something they called Forest Bathing, but there was no common framework connecting those experiences. “Everyone is different. Everyone is doing their own way, and they call it Forest Bathing.”
Betty explains that this was one of the reasons the FTHub Method resonated. “What they notice is that we’re actually very good at putting an experience into a framework, a sequence, a methodology that everyone can easily follow.” That structure does not mean every guide has to deliver exactly the same experience. Quite the opposite. The framework gives practitioners a foundation while leaving room for their own professional backgrounds and cultural knowledge. A practitioner with a psychology background might bring psychological skills into the experience; someone deeply connected to Chinese tea culture might incorporate tea drinking or a tea ceremony.
The important thing, Betty says, is that the foundation remains consistent. “They can have different styles, but the foundation is solid.” This balance between structure and adaptability became particularly important in China, where Betty spent considerable time translating the FTHub Method into Chinese and helping build an understanding of the practice. But she also found that the cultural foundations for a deeper relationship with nature were already there. China does not need to be introduced to the idea that nature matters. Betty points to Taoist traditions in which people are encouraged not to live against nature, but within it, to understand themselves as part of a larger natural system. “In most people’s mindset, they know nature is good for us,” she says. “But what they don’t know is how can they utilize nature?”
For Betty, however, “utilize” is not quite the right endpoint. One of the principles she wants to bring into the conversation is reciprocity. “We receive lots of benefit from nature, but at the same time, we also bring something good for the well-being of nature.”
That idea of planetary wellbeing is particularly relevant when a beautiful natural place becomes a destination for visitors. The challenge is to create access without destroying the qualities that make the landscape valuable in the first place. At Wang Gang Ping, this became a central consideration.
What Makes a Landscape Therapeutic?
It would be easy to assume that a spectacular landscape automatically makes a therapeutic landscape. Betty says the project changed her own thinking about this. “Before, when I’m talking about a therapeutic landscape, I would always think about a very natural, beautiful place.” But beauty alone is not enough. “Even this place, it’s natural, it’s beautiful, it’s not therapeutic if people cannot safely and easily experience it.” For Betty, this means that a therapeutic landscape has to be considered through a combination of qualities, including safety, accessibility, sensory richness, biodiversity, and the ways people can actually experience the place.
At Wang Gang Ping, the project team considered several potential areas. One was at a much higher altitude, around 2,000 meters, which could make it physically demanding for some visitors. Another was more urban, with lawns but fewer trees, less shade, and potentially less biodiversity. The selected area offered a different balance. It sits at a relatively lower altitude, has access by road, and can accommodate a wider range of visitors. Accessibility was considered for older visitors and people with mobility limitations as well as for people who are physically active.
The project then looked beyond physical access to the character of the landscape itself. There is the biodiversity: trees, mosses, mushrooms, berries, and wild fruits, alongside wildlife including deer and red pandas. There is the soundscape, from birdsong to the sound of wind moving through the trees. Betty describes the latter almost poetically. “When the wind comes through, the tree leaf sounds like the waves, the ocean waves, but it’s like the waves of the trees.”
And then there is Mount Gongga. The landscape faces the mountain, a culturally and spiritually significant mountain in the region. For local people, the mountain has a deep cultural resonance, while for visitors it creates a powerful visual focal point. The combination matters. A therapeutic landscape is not simply a collection of beautiful features. It is a place where accessibility, sensory qualities, biodiversity, culture, and human experience interact.
Why Distance From The City Matters
There is another quality that Betty believes is particularly important in contemporary China: distance. Wang Gang Ping is several hours from the city. That can sound like a disadvantage for a tourist destination, but in the context of Forest Therapy it becomes part of the experience.
In an urban park, people may technically be surrounded by trees while still being surrounded by traffic, buildings, phones, commercial activity, and other people. “It’s just to give them some minimum dose,” Betty says of the nature experiences people may get in cities. At Wang Gang Ping, the transition is more complete. “You won’t see those high buildings, you won’t see those highways, and it’s just the nature and animals.”
The physical distance from the city can create psychological distance from everyday routines. And importantly, the landscape is designed to make it possible to do something that can feel surprisingly difficult: nothing. The site includes hammocks where visitors can lie down, areas for sitting and listening, spaces for mindfulness and meditation, and places for social or creative activities. There is also a roughly 200-meter barefoot trail, where visitors can remove their shoes and walk slowly across different natural textures, including leaves and moss.
The aim is not to make nature easier to notice. Signs along the trails encourage visitors to slow down, look closely, listen, and pay attention to details they might normally miss.
Adapting to Different Levels of Experience
The landscape does not have a single route. There are two main entrances, three defined trails, and a loop in the lower part of the forest. A complete route is no more than around 1.5 kilometers, but guides can also adapt the route to the group and create their own sequence within the landscape. Someone new to Forest Bathing can follow an established route and use the different activity areas. A more experienced practitioner can design a more individual experience. “It’s suitable for different levels of experience,” Betty says. “Some people may have not that much experience. They can easily follow the trail we’ve given.” For her, this is another way the physical landscape and professional training work together. The trail provides the infrastructure; trained guides provide the human facilitation. And neither has to operate independently.
Local Culture Shapes The Experience
One of the most distinctive aspects of Wang Gang Ping is the presence of local culture within the experience. The area is home to an ethnic minority group whose traditions are part of the relationship between people and the mountain landscape. Visitors can encounter local cultural practices, including a ceremony before a Forest Bathing experience.
Betty describes meeting members of that group and seeing how they welcome visitors through singing and prayer. This is not an ornamental cultural add-on, but part of understanding the place itself. “The nature is very important, the environment is important, but what culture we can combine” is also important when creating an experience.
That approach extends to other elements of Chinese culture. Practitioners have experimented with incorporating tea ceremonies and traditional Chinese ways of experiencing tea into Forest Bathing. Betty also describes connecting the traditional Chinese concept of the five elements with sensory experiences in nature, feeling air against the skin, listening to wind, watching leaves move, and observing how different elements can be experienced through the senses. The FTHub Method, she argues, is flexible enough to hold these different cultural expressions without losing its methodological foundation.
Changing The Way People See Nature
The Wang Gang Ping project is already being viewed as more than a single destination. For Betty, scaling Forest Therapy in China can happen in several ways. The same landscape can support different experiences according to season, time of day, and group. Other landscapes within the wider destination could also be developed, including blue-space experiences.
And, perhaps most significantly, other scenic destinations have begun approaching FTHub after seeing what has been developed at Wang Gang Ping. “Now we have already received a few requests from other parts of China,” Betty says. That is where the project becomes potentially transformative: not because one trail exists, but because it can demonstrate what a different relationship between tourism, nature, and wellbeing might look like.
Betty has already noticed people spending longer periods sitting and resting rather than simply walking through the landscape, taking photographs, and moving on. “If this continues, people can continue doing that in that space,” she says. “They change their behavior, they prolong their time staying there.”
But there is a deeper ambition behind that behavioral change. Betty hopes that people will begin to see nature not simply as a destination or resource, but as something they can have an ongoing relationship with. “Nature can be my friend,” she says. Nature, in this view, is not merely somewhere to visit on vacation or a backdrop for photographs. It can become somewhere people return to when they need to slow down, reconnect, or simply spend time outside.
And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the Wang Gang Ping experiment. The project asks what might happen when people build a deeper relationship with nature, and how that connection might ripple outward, helping people care more for themselves, for one another, and for the places they share.
Ready to take the next step? The FTHub Therapeutic Landscapes Consultant accreditation trains professionals to evaluate existing natural spaces for their therapeutic potential, design new or improved landscapes that support nature-based health interventions, and certify therapeutic spaces on behalf of FTHub.
Frequently asked questions
What is a therapeutic landscape?
According to Betty Fang, a therapeutic landscape is more than a beautiful place. It combines safety, accessibility, sensory richness, biodiversity, and the ways people can actually experience the place, and it has to be considered as a whole. FTHub’s Therapeutic Landscapes Consultant accreditation covers assessing and designing this kind of space.
What is Wang Gang Ping?
Wang Gang Ping is a mountain landscape in Sichuan facing Mount Gongga. A new therapeutic landscape was developed there after landscape owners asked FTHub how to design places that support therapeutic experiences. It includes hammocks, areas for sitting and listening, spaces for mindfulness and meditation, and a roughly 200-meter barefoot trail.
How is Forest Bathing in China shaped by local culture?
The FTHub Method gives guides a consistent foundation while leaving room for their own backgrounds. Betty Fang describes practitioners adding tea ceremonies and linking the traditional Chinese concept of the five elements to sensory experiences in nature. She also points to Taoist traditions that already place people within a larger natural system.
Why does distance from the city matter for Forest Therapy in China?
Wang Gang Ping is several hours from the city, so visitors see no high buildings or highways. That physical distance can create psychological distance from everyday routines, a quality Betty Fang considers important in contemporary China. In an urban park, people can be surrounded by trees and still be surrounded by traffic, phones, and commercial activity.
How does Betty Fang measure success at Wang Gang Ping?
She looks at whether visitors behave differently rather than at how many come. She has already noticed people sitting and resting for longer instead of walking through, taking photographs, and moving on. Her deeper hope is that people come to see nature as something they can have an ongoing relationship with.
