Abstract：Theme planning is the key point in the course of tourist area exploitation. Whichever tourist areas should have its particular theme. In the practices of tourism planning, we often find the clue of themes is very hard for us to choose in one tourist area.
The theme of tourist area is the core thought of tourism area development. The process of theme planning can be generalized as follows:Firstly finding the clue of theme. The clue of theme comes from two aspects. One is from the tourism resources themselves by investigating the category of tourism resources, quality of tourism resources, quantity of tourism resources, size of tourism resources as well as the complexion of combination of tourism resources. Another is from the need of tourism market by studying three dimensions that is consisted of time axis, space axis and culture axis. Then ascertaining the type of theme. The choice of type theme considers three factors:according with the property the tourist area, extruding the character of the tourist resource, meeting for the interests of travelers. Finally the selected theme must be inspected through the tourist market. That include whether it has originality or caters for the expectations of tourists.
Theme planning is prerequisite to successful development of tourist area. Only after the theme planning can the whole work of tourist area development have its orientation, emphasis and order. All of the scenes and facilities can be combined into an organic and ordered tourist system. The practice of tourist area planning demands the theory of theme planning as guidance. The study on the theme planning of tourist area is not perfect though it was paid attention by some scholars. For all these reason, this paper makes a preliminary research on the theme planning of a tourist area.
