The story
Ili Lavender Festival in Yining/Ili
The Ili Lavender Festival marks the June bloom across Ili prefecture's fields, concentrated most heavily in Huocheng County within the valley that Yining serves as prefectural capital for, a growing region that supplies over ninety-five percent of China's lavender and is ranked with Provence and Hokkaido among the world's top three lavender landscapes.
Purple fields stretching across a Central Asian-facing valley give the Ili Lavender Festival its scenery: Ili, a Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in northern Xinjiang with Yining as its prefectural capital, sits inside China's largest lavender-growing region, an area that accounts for more than ninety-five percent of the country's total lavender cultivation and is ranked internationally alongside France's Provence and Japan's Hokkaido as one of the world's three major lavender-producing landscapes.