a b s t r a c t
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 ofWest 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 ofWest 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.