• It's of a militarily-sensitive region
  
• Much of the terrain on the west side of the main north-south road is used by the military. The area where the map sits has been used for military exercise. North of here (OK, possibly no connection) is an airbase with weapons storage and hangars tunneled into the mountain.
  
• Most of the vehicles parked around the model are olive-green (well, my imagination tells me that; GE colors are sometimes pretty bad). There are many dump trucks (there seems to be a lot of activity there), but even more personnel carriers. Inside that other facility, on the west side, it's true that there are vehicles of various colors. Perhaps that one does have a civilian function?
  
• Too close to town? In the Chinese deserts military facilities are often right on the edge of towns, though on the side towards the hills, and away from agriculture. I have seen this hundred of times.
  
• It's not possible to tell whether there's a fence. Looking on the south side of the area, the one without the trees planted, there are regularly spaced tiny blobs that are a shade darker than the embankment. But, again, it's impossible to say if they represent a fence.
  
• There appears to a guard tower on the west as well as on the north side
  
• If you're referring to the tower in the middle of the facility on the east of the model, that appears to be for radio broadcasting.
  

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Huangyangtan, the locality of an artillery shooting range, is 90 km away from Beijing and is one of the sources of sandstorms hitting Beijing. In order to improve the ecological environment there, the Beijing MAC has invested 500, 000 persons/times, millions of yuan of fund to plant trees and grow grass totalling75,000 mu. The forest coverage has increased from 0.08% at the beginning of building the shooting range to the present 62.5%. A coordinated tactics-drilling base of the military area command and a drilling base of a unit have invested large amount of manpower and material to afforestation. Now the barren hills and wastelands in the past have taken on a new green look and the forest and grass survival rate reached 90% and above. The Hongshan Military Horse Ranch has adopted such comprehensive harnessing measures as enclosing pastures where herding horse is forbidden, while growing trees and grass on these pastures to recover the deteriorated grassland. The National Afforestation Committee and the Environmental Protection and Afforestation Committee of the PLA have named the Hongshan Military Horse Ranch as the �Demonstration Base in Ecological Construction� of the state and the army.

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I propose a contest; have forum readers suggest alternate uses. I'll go first: this is China's first miniature golf course based on the terrain of one of the territories they occupy.

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