Abstract: World Heritage is precious tourist attractions, which has an important influence on their spatial distribution pattern of regional tourism in China. This paper compares spatial distribution of China's world heritages on various scales, and reveals the spatial distribution features, which can provide scientific basis for applying new world heritage to be inscribed in the List and managing current heritage sites. We carry out a study of macro-regional differentiation on 38 world heritage sites in China based on spatial structure analysis, in terms of sizes from the national, provincial, south and north, eastern, central and western regions and the Huhuanyong population line. The results are obtained as follows. 1) World heritages in China are distributed in several regions, mainly in the surrounding area of Beijing, the middle and lower Yellow River, the lower Yangtze River basin and Southwest China; 2) 22 provincial regions including Beijing Municipality as well as provinces of Liaoning and Sichuan have world heritages and Beijing ranked first for 6 sites; 3) the south is prior to the north of China in terms of the area and number of the world heritages, in addition, the natural heritages are mainly distributed in the south; 4) all the east, central and western parts of China have world heritages, however, the density in eastern and central China is higher than that in western China; 5) most of the world heritages are located to the southeast of the Huhuanyong Line.

Key words: World Heritage, spatial distribution, geographical features, the Huhuanyong Line, China