Abstract: Tourist resources are the material basis of sustainable tourism and the potentiality of tourism economic growth. As the working criterion and technical guide for investigating tourist resources, the classification system of tourist resources is a very important premise of the work. Based on the criterion for investigating Chinese tourist resources, the new classification system was put forward. The newly added are three serials of natural, human and service; ten types of geologic landscape, water scene, climate and biology, other natural scene, historic heritage, modern human attractions, abstract human attractions, other human attraction, service resource and other service resources; plus ninety eight patterns. There are three grades to indicate the scale of monocase of tourist resources, which are field, segment and site. The tourist resources also can be divided into three states: developed, to be developed and latent. Based on this new classification system, more consummate characteristic item was revised, and the quantitative evaluation of types tourist resources was carried out by taking the Beihai City as an example to validate this system and methods. In the end, the paper points out that in order to achieve sustainable tourism, China must consummate the criterion for investigating tourist resources, and expand investigations to provide a series of tourist extractive engineering for building China into a country even more attractive to tourists in the world.

Key words: tourist resources, classification system, types evaluation, China