China’s Highway Rest Stop Becomes a Tourist Magnet
A highway service area in eastern China’s Zhejiang province drew nearly 80,000 visitors in a single day during the National Day Golden Week, an unexpected surge that its operators say reflects the rising consumption power of China’s county-level markets — and a deliberate strategy to reinvent the humble rest stop as a regional destination.
The S9 Su-Tai Expressway Tongxiang Service Area, located in Tongxiang, a county-level city under Jiaxing, welcomed almost 80,000 people on October 1, the first day of the holiday, according to local official data cited by The Paper. License plates at the site included not only local Zhe F tags but also vehicles from neighboring Jiangsu and Shanghai — and even some from Guangdong, more than 1,000 kilometers away.
Redefining the Rest Stop
The service area, shaped like a giant silver-white butterfly with curved facades spanning both sides of the expressway, began trial operations on September 25. It is billed as Zhejiang’s first “three-dimensional open-style” service area, and its defining feature is that it dissolves the physical barrier between the highway and the surrounding city.
Equipped with “two-in, two-out” ETC entrances and mixed lanes, the facility allows city residents to drive in directly without ever getting onto the expressway, and a toll station on the grounds lets cars enter or exit the highway at will. That design fundamentally expands the purpose of a service area: rather than serving only drivers and passengers, it opens its doors to ordinary residents and dedicated visitors.
As China News reported, the interior was partly designed by the China Academy of Art and adopts a “Song dynasty elegance” theme, with the west district styled after the Northern Song and the east district after the Southern Song. Three glass bubble pillars symbolize Tongxiang’s three pillar industries: mulberry silk, chemical fiber, and glass fiber.
A Mall, a Museum, and a Stage in One
What sets the site apart is its commercial and cultural mix. More than 20 chain brands — including KFC and Chagee — line a circular pedestrian route, alongside local specialties such as Haichang cake and radish silk cakes. A 3,000-square-meter outlet discount zone anchors the retail offering.
The facility also claims several national firsts among Chinese highway service areas. According to Tongxiang News, these include the first walk-in live butterfly science museum, the first immersive intangible-heritage “flying” performance space, the first bookstore-themed café, and the largest tech-sports entertainment complex and outlet mall of any service area in the country. There is also an independent cashmere-themed hall and a robot band of four intelligent machines playing guitar, piano, drums, and flute alongside a live human vocalist.
The butterfly theme runs deep: the architecture takes its cue from silkworm and mulberry culture, and visitors can watch live butterflies in a glass enclosure that simulates their habitat. In a nod to local flavors, the famed Yaoqiang mutton noodle shop opened its first outlet inside an open-style national service area. “People used to exit the highway and drive into the city just for a bowl of mutton noodles; now they can eat it right as they pass by,” restaurant manager Xu Yongqiang told China News.
Tongxiang’s Service-Area Empire
The choice of Tongxiang as the site is far from accidental. As Hangzhou.com detailed in a background report, the people of this small city have effectively cornered China’s highway service-area market over two decades.
The story began in 1983, when the G320 national road connecting Tongxiang and Jiaxing opened and farmers from the Fengming subdistrict began selling local chrysanthemum tea by the roadside. When expressways siphoned away that traffic, they pivoted into the service-area business itself. By around 1998, pioneer Shen Jianlin and three fellow villagers contracted a chrysanthemum counter at a Jiaxing service area; within two years they had taken over its restaurants and supermarkets.
That model scaled rapidly. Of the roughly 3,000-plus service-area pairs nationwide, more than 1,200 are operated, in whole or in part, by Tongxiang enterprises, according to the 2020 report. By another estimate, nearly 80 percent of externally contracted service areas are run by Tongxiang natives. As of 2020, the city counted 347 companies with “highway service area management” in their scope of business, of which 190 listed it as their main activity, with total registered capital of 6.47 billion yuan.
Notable projects attributed to this network include the Meicun Service Area in Wuxi, which draws around 100,000 visitors a day and has been dubbed a “little Wanda” for its mall-like scale, and the Yangcheng Lake Service Area near Suzhou, celebrated for integrating classical Suzhou garden elements. The industry has evolved, operators say, from a “1.0” version offering fast food, supermarkets, gas, and toilets, to a “2.0” model of third-party-funded commercial complexes, to a “3.0” emphasis on cultural atmosphere and internet-famous appeal.
Why the County Market Matters
The new Tongxiang facility, its operators argue, fills a gap and captures a larger trend. “The three-dimensional open design turns the traditional highway stop into a new destination for short trips around the Hangzhou-Jiaxing-Huzhou area,” Shen Kaihui, deputy general manager of operator Jiaxing Kaitong Investment Co., told China News. The company’s broader ambition, she added, is to build the site into a benchmark, one that draws together highway traffic, city footfall, and tourist flow.
Behind the phenomenon lies Tongxiang’s economic base. The city is perennially ranked among China’s top 100 county economies, usually within the top 10 to 20, and ranks fifth nationally for comprehensive county-level tourism strength. It is home to Wuzhen, the water town that hosts the permanent World Internet Conference, and to Puyuan, a “fashion ancient town” known for hosting fashion weeks distinct from Wuzhen’s traditional appeal. Puyuan’s woolen sweater industry is a national powerhouse: as the line at the cashmere hall goes, “of every 10 sweaters in China, seven come from Puyuan.”
The regional strategy extends beyond a single site. During a September 29 launch event titled “Enjoy a Bountiful Year Along the Way,” the province released a Service Area Consumption Map covering 107 service areas and unveiled five transport-tourism integration routes anchored on the service area as a hub, linking Wuzhen, Puyuan, Shimen, Heshan, and Zhouquan. As Tongxiang News reported, the event also saw the founding of the Yishang Transport-Tourism Integration Development Alliance, jointly initiated by local service-area, woolen sweater, travel, and cycling associations.
The provincial vision, according to Huang Xiaobin, director of the Zhejiang Highway & Transport Management Center, is to move service areas from being mere “travel stations” to “consumption highlands,” using them as “mobile windows” of common-prosperity development. Zhejiang has already produced a string of internet-famous check-in points, from Tonglu’s “Fuchun Garden” to Jinhua’s “Panda Pig” and the Jiashao Bridge’s “Jin Yong Wuxia” theme.
What to Watch
Flow, once attracted, still has to be absorbed. During the holiday, Tongxiang ran a free shuttle service and set up four temporary free parking points for private cars, while local bus route 18 connects the city directly to the service area. A 99-yuan holiday package covering dining, drinks, entertainment, and shopping — with a stated value of about 300 yuan — was designed to convert curious visitors into spending customers.
Whether the model endures beyond the holiday surge is the open question. The broader significance, analysts suggest, lies less in the novelty of a butterfly-shaped building than in its demonstration effect: a county-level city leveraging its industrial roots, cultural heritage, and infrastructure to turn passersby into tourists — and tourists into customers. As the feature in The Paper put it, some places need only one visit, while others make people want to return. That, its author suggested, is the mark of a place that keeps producing new experiences — and a fitting portrait of China’s fast-evolving county economies.