Abstract: Resident is an important stakeholder of tourism. Sense of place, perception of benefits and costs affect residents' satisfaction, and further affect the sustainable development of tourism resorts. Previous studies were mostly about the one-way relationship of how sense of place affects the perception of tourism impacts, but what is the other way round? Based on an exploratory factor analysis, we find that residents' perception of tourism impacts can be classified into three parts: perceived costs, perceived psychic benefits and perceived physical benefits. Then is there any structural relationship within the residents' perception of tourism impacts? This article uses the world natural heritage Sanqingshan Resort as a case. Based on a review of existing literatures we build a structural equation model (SEM) using questionnaire survey and interview data. The survey questions include basic demographic characteristics of residents, sense of place, perception of tourism impacts, satisfaction and so on. The survey samples are located in the two entrances of the core scenic area of the research site and comprised of 271 residents who are greatly influenced by tourism. The result of this research indicates that: (1) Sense of place and the perception of tourism impacts influence each other. There is no significant mutual impact between cost perception and sense of place. Sense of place and the perceived benefits have a strong impact on each other, especially the perceived psychic benefits influence strongly residents' sense of place. Residents' sense of place as a kind of human emotion has a similar influence on the perceived psychic benefits. The deeper residents' sense of place, the more intense are the perceived psychic benefits, for example, image promotion of tourism resorts. Better psychic benefits improve residents' sense of place. (2) Perceived benefits including perceived psychic benefits and physical benefits play the most significant role on the sense of place and satisfaction in SEM, especially the perceived psychic benefits. These two parts in perceived benefits influence each other significantly. (3) Residents' sense of place has a positive significant impact on satisfaction, the same as perceived psychic benefits and perceived physical benefits, but perceived costs have negative and non-significant impact on satisfaction. Residents' perceived psychic benefits improve satisfaction more efficiently than physical benefits, but this does not mean perceived physical benefits are unimportant: perceived psychic benefits and perceived physical benefits have a strong mutual influence. As tourism develops, local residents feel pride for the place (which denotes a strong perception of psychic benefits), and this generates better expectation for physical benefits. As a result, perceived psychic benefits play a stronger role in connecting residents' sense of place and satisfaction than perceived physical benefits. (4) We also classified the surveyed residents into native and non-native by birthplace to test differences between natives and immigrants. Native residents' sense of place and perceived psychic benefits are higher than non-native, and are more sensitive about perceived costs, while the perceived physical benefits are lower than non-native residents. One shortcoming of this study is that, although the measured variables have high factor loadings, their number is small, which may not be enough to illustrate latent variables efficiently. The number of measured variables should be increased in future research to test the results.

Key words: Mount Sanqingshan, perceived physical benefits, perceived psychic benefits, perception of tourism, resident