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A new court garden has opened in the province of Guangdong. This may seem like everyday ordinary news, but this is no ordinary garden, not with its ultra-luxurious public toilet where everything is covered in pure gold.

Reporter:
Nan-yue-yuan (南岳苑) is a newly opened court garden set in the city of Fanyu (番禹) in Guangdong province. Its name might not ring any bells, but the spending for the court garden is guaranteed to blow your mind. The local district government spent a total 250 million yuan on the project. Among the details, a staggering sub-project of a public toilet worth eight million yuan is especially dazzling.

The toilet building has luxury written all over it. According to the garden officials, with gold decorated rooftops and gold-plated toilet seats and toilet paper holders, the luxury standard of the toilet is greater than a six-star hotel.

A total of one kilogram of pure gold was used in the building of the toilet alone, with nine other kilos spent around the garden, wrapping wooden sculptures and building decorations.

While some might argue the scene is a throw-back to the once flamboyant royal court garden with its excessive extravagance, experts in gardening would beg to differ. Professor Li Min of South China Agricultural University says this garden is not comparable to the traditional Chinese gardens.

"Cantonese gardens, in the traditional sense, have never displayed such royal glamour or decorations of expensive metals and precious stones. Often those gardens were beautiful through exquisite plants and flowers."

The penchant for building ultra-extravagant toilets is not just a Cantonese concept: a four-star public toilet has been built in Nanjing. It contains large plasma screen TVs and the washbowls are made of traditional blue and white porcelain. The Nanjing local government spent 400 thousand yuan on the project. And as expensive as that is, it doesn't compare with the five million yuan the Shanghai government spent on a luxurious toilet in Shanghai's She-shan-yue (佘山月) lake district.

Most of those luxurious toilets are built as tourist attractions, and some of them are even being raised to the level of "name card" for the city. Reactions from the public towards these vain examples of city government excess are similar all over.

"All they have to do is to exhibit the local characteristic culture through the garden, not build some extravagant toilet to show off by spending this obscene amount of money on one public toilet. They could easily have built ten equally practical facilities benefiting the public. I don't think the value of a toilet is measured via the amount of gold they use."

"There's just no point spending all that money on a toilet and setting it as a tourist attraction. It's just pointless […] this kind of PR stunt is interesting at best, but from a practical, or an economical aspect, I think they are completely out of their minds!"

Hong Kong gold and jewelry magnate, Lin Shirong (林世榮), spent 38 million Hong Kong Dollars and used almost half a ton of gold to build a pure golden toilet in Hong Kong back in 2001, the toilet has been a great tourist spot since then, attracting ten-thousand visitors daily. But no one has been lucky enough to actually use it.