Abstract: Rural tourism development in China has witnessed a rapid growth in the last decade, and many authors went to deep understanding about definition of rural tourism, rural tourism product programming and planning, and other aspects of agro-tourism. But according to literature review, we need more knowledge about spatial structures of rural tourism development around cities where main markets are located. Seventy four rural attractions around 69 Chinese cities are randomly collected and processed by employing geographical techniques to explore spatial structure of those attractions by the authors. Under some definite assumptions, several findings could be observed: All rural attractions distributed around cities demonstrate distance decay, although with some fluctuations, which could described by a simulative equation of 6th order as:
y =-4E-0.6x⁶ + 0.0004x⁵-0.0145x⁴ + 0.2622x³-2.3527x² + 8.4049x + 2.1296
There are as high as 88% rural tourism attractions that were built up within a distance of 100 km from their primary origin city, while two concentrated sections could be identified at about 20 km and 70 km respectively away from the central city, but the 20 km section is more higher clustered one for rural attraction development. At about 50 km section away from the central city, which is just located between the two attraction clusters, a less developed area for rural tourism appears where only a few of attractions have been built. Spatial analysis tells the story behind the curtain: sub-central cities/towns around the major origin city are often allocated at that distance and bring interference to recreational activities there.