Tourism in China comes in all sorts of colours, but green is not normally one of them. China may leave western visitors feeling blue, seeing red or sunk in a black rage – but few go home raving about how green the place is.

Yet improbable as it may sound, one of the world’s most eco-friendly resorts recently opened near Shanghai – possibly the worst-served major city in the world, from the point of view of proximate natural beauty spots. The resort, Naked Stables – which uses loo water to power the room heaters and has walls made partly of rubbish – is working to be certified the world’s greenest resort outside the US by the US Green Building Council, under its prestigious Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design programme.

For Rmb1,800 ($286) per night, the nature-starved masses of Shanghai can stay in a mud hut at Naked Stables, under a roof of bamboo thatch, with an unpredictable hot water supply and toilet water that is slightly brown in hue, because the resort recycles 100 per cent of its water. For entertainment, they can watch bamboo grow: the resort is surrounded by a forest whose bamboo grows up to a metre per day. Scant wonder the New York Times recently named the local area – Moganshan, a hill station for Europeans and gangsters in the 1930s – one of the world’s 45 top places to visit in 2012.