Exhibition Greenhouse, Ningbo Botanical Garden (宁波植物园展览温室)

Ningbo Botanical Garden is a large municipal project in Zhenhai District. According to the Chinese-language Wikipedia, work began on 26 September 2011 and a first phase of 120 hectares opened on 28 September 2016, within a 322-hectare site and organised into seventeen specialised gardens.

The exhibition greenhouse came later. In September 2023 the Ningbo authorities published the call for tenders for the ground survey and design of the project, followed in November by the tender for site supervision. According to the provincial public procurement platform, the design contract went to the Tongji University Architectural Design and Research Institute (Group), working with a Ningbo foundation-engineering firm, and was signed on 1 November 2023.

By July 2024 local media were showing the underground structure taking shape. At the end of January 2026 the works were in their final stage and an April opening was announced. The greenhouse opened to the public on Saturday 25 April 2026, with entry by advance booking.

The greenhouse stands on a plot of about 20 mu, roughly 1.3 hectares, in the garden's science and sightseeing zone. Gate 1 lies immediately to the east and a planned body of water to the west, while to the north and south it links up with the Four Seasons Flower Garden and the garden of the city's emblematic tree and flower. Its floor area comes close to 10,000 m².

The programme described during construction listed seven themed pavilions, including a tall tropical rainforest hall, together with a reception area, storage, an energy centre, visitor services, a temporary exhibition space and a shop. Six halls were presented at the opening; OpenStreetMap draws them as separate volumes grouped within the greenhouse footprint. Each has its own precise control of temperature, humidity and light, so as to reproduce the conditions of the climate zones the plants come from. The sources consulted describe neither the frame nor the cladding material.

When the opening was announced at the end of January 2026, the greenhouse held more than 1,700 kinds of plants; the figure given on opening day was over 2,000. The tropical rainforest hall, the largest, illustrates phenomena typical of such forests: buttress roots, strangler plants and trees whose aerial roots end up forming a small grove on their own.

The arid-plants hall lines up tall columnar cacti alongside a broad range of succulents, while the carnivorous plants hall shows Venus flytraps and pitcher plants among others. Two halls are devoted to entire families, the bromeliads and the begonias, displaying their variety of forms and foliage. Finally, the Four Seasons Garden stages tropical flowering plants that change through the year.

The greenhouse lies just inside Gate 1 on the eastern side of the botanical garden, which makes it a natural first stop; entry to the halls is by a booking code obtained in advance. The rest of the grounds invite a longer walk. The Four Seasons Flower Garden and the city emblem garden adjoin the greenhouse, while the orchid garden, Butterfly Lake with its large lawn, and the plum, bamboo and maple gardens are a few hundred metres away. A popular-science museum named after the botanist Zhong Guanguang stands in the western part of the park.