Six Official Registers List 1,991 A-Level Scenic Areas. Here Is the Open Dataset.
A citable CC BY 4.0 compilation of 1,991 A-level scenic areas from six Chinese provincial and municipal culture-and-tourism registers, with normalized grades, source provenance, method and limits.
Six public culture-and-tourism registers contain 1,991 officially listed A-level scenic areas: 329 in Chongqing, 532 in Guizhou, 580 in Henan, 314 in Jilin, 145 in Shanghai and 91 in Xi'an. We compiled every published row, normalized the five grade labels and preserved source-level provenance in a CC BY 4.0 JSON dataset. Of the 861 rows whose government register states whether admission is charged, 596 say no admission ticket is charged. That price-related coverage comes only from Chongqing and Guizhou and must not be extrapolated nationwide.
How many A-level scenic areas are in the dataset?
| Measure | Count | Share or scope |
|---|---|---|
| Official register entries | 1,991 | Six registers |
| 5A | 56 | 2.8% |
| 4A | 702 | 35.3% |
| 3A | 1,004 | 50.4% |
| 2A | 211 | 10.6% |
| 1A | 18 | 0.9% |
| Entries with a government-published admission-charge field | 861 | Chongqing + Guizhou only |
| Entries marked as charging no admission ticket | 596 | 69% of the 861 |
For scale, TravelerLocal's own attraction coverage currently contains 888 attractions nationwide, while these six official registers alone contain 1,991 entries. The two counts measure different things: our travel coverage is curated around visitor decisions; the official registers enumerate every graded scenic area within their stated jurisdictions.
What do these numbers actually mean?
The long middle of the register is 3A and 4A, not just famous 5A sights. The dataset has 56 5A entries, but 1,706 entries are graded 3A or 4A. That makes it useful for studying the official scenic-area system beyond the small set most English-language travel guides cover.
"No admission charge" is a register field, not a promise that every activity is free. A row marked charges: "否" says the publishing authority did not list an admission ticket for that scenic area. Transport, performances, internal venues or seasonal activities may still cost money.
The 69% figure is deliberately narrow. It is 596 of the 861 entries for which a government register publishes the charge field. Only Chongqing and Guizhou supply that field. Henan, Jilin, Shanghai and Xi'an do not, so the dataset omits the key instead of guessing and the percentage must not be presented as a China-wide free-admission rate.
How was the dataset compiled, and what should you distrust?
We retrieved six public registers from the relevant provincial or municipal culture-and-tourism authorities and transcribed every published row as-is. We made no manual additions. The only transformation is grade normalization: AAAAA becomes 5A, AAAA becomes 4A, down through A becoming 1A. Official Chinese names remain unchanged.
Each entry points back to a source key, and the dataset metadata records the publisher, source URL or URLs, retrieval date, jurisdictional scope and row count for all six inputs. Optional fields such as district, address, phone, charge status, prices and rating date appear only when the official register supplies them; an absent key means the source did not provide a usable value.
Distrust false completeness. This is not a national Ministry of Culture and Tourism register and it does not cover every province in China. Xi'an is a city-level register represented under Shaanxi, while the other inputs have provincial or provincial-level municipal scope. Registers can also lag promotions, removals, renamed attractions and changed prices after their retrieval date. Use the source metadata to decide whether a field is current enough for your purpose.
Can I cite and reuse the raw data?
Yes. Download the complete China A-Level Scenic Areas dataset. It is licensed under CC BY 4.0; please attribute TravelerLocal.ai and link to this guide. The JSON contains the method, limitations and original government source URLs needed to keep the citation auditable.
Is this a complete national list of China's A-level scenic areas?
No. It is a faithful aggregation of six public registers covering Chongqing, Guizhou, Henan, Jilin, Shanghai and Xi'an. It should be cited as a six-register dataset, not as a complete national total.
Does 69% of China's A-level scenic areas charge no admission ticket?
No. The 69% result describes only the 596 no-charge rows among 861 entries with a published charge field. Chongqing and Guizhou are the only sources for that field, so the result cannot be extrapolated nationwide.