The significance of the West Lake pattern and its heuristic implications for creating China's heritage tourism economics

West Lake's economic, social and cultural structure comprises six facets: (1) maintaining West Lake World Heritage Site as an open accessible tourist location; (2) ensuring the planning, management and tourism marketing of West Lake are culturally rather than purely economically oriented; therefore truly benefitting the preservation and conservation of West Lake; (3) selectively decreasing and mitigating the tourism pressure on West Lake, especially in those areas of high cultural, ecological and environmental vulnerability; (4) ensuring travellers adopt appropriate sustainable tourism values to enjoy a positive experience; (5) ensuring the marketing of West Lake tourism and the consequent distribution of incomes comply with legal and other appropriate standards; and (6) expanding and extending the social benefits of West Lake tourism. To aid the examination of West Lake in this paper, a comparison is made between the management policies of West Lake and Mt, Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) to illustrate a number of fundamental and organisational relationships involving tourism at heritage sites.