Zhou Mengyuan, a tourist from Beijing, decided to take her annual leave to Liuzhou, a city in southern China, after watching a short video.

The video, featuring delightful scenery and mouth-watering street food, has gone viral on the internet, gathering a host of foodies and travel enthusiasts.

Such scenes were hard to imagine in the 1980s and 1990s when Liuzhou was better known as an industrial city plagued by acid rain. The city once experienced acid rain in up to 98.4 percent of precipitation events.

The city in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has been noted for its large concentration of smokestack industries, including steel smelters and chemical plants.

Bristling with chimneys, the extensive mode of growth had left the city under thick smoke, with a less than 9-km stretch of a river in the urban area filled with more than 30 drainage ditches.

By 2022, Liuzhou had 1,291 enterprises, each with an annual business turnover of at least 20 million yuan (about 2.9 million U.S. dollars), and achieved an output value of 420 billion yuan, accounting for about one-fifth of the region's total.

However, the once "city of acid rain" secured first place in surface water quality among all Chinese cities at the prefecture level and above since 2020.

Liuzhou is a microcosm of the country's efforts to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects, including a livable environment.

In the early 2000s, Liuzhou launched a campaign to upgrade its industrial layout, shutting down, transforming, and relocating a batch of high-polluting enterprises. Now the city has donned a completely new look.

"I didn't expect the environment of an industrial city can be so good," said Zhou.

Liuzhou Steel Group, for example, channeled heavily into sewage treatment, greatly helping improve the water quality of the city.

The company built three wastewater treatment stations, with over 98 percent of the industrial wastewater recycled.

Clean water has even become a calling card for the city. Liuzhou has held the China Liuzhou International Water Carnival for 12 consecutive years, wooing a large number of tourists.

"The water quality of Liujiang River in Liuzhou is getting better and better, the environment is more and more beautiful, and there are more tourists. We have such a beautiful scenery at our doorstep, which makes us full of happiness and pride," said Chen Bei, a local resident.