Big crowds but better management at China’s main tourist attractions mark a less-stressful start to ‘golden week’ holiday
Beijing’s Forbidden City sold two tickets every second while people joked they could stroll their dogs and make friends on multiple-lane expressways that had been turned into temporary car parks at the National Day “golden week” got underway.
Visitors swarmed to many tourist attractions that quickly reached capacity on Thursday, China’s National Day, as the annual week-long holiday officially kicked off.
As in previous years, tourists thronged to the famous West Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, the Zhejiang Daily reported. Parks and attractions around the lake received 388,000 of the 1.55 million tourists who converged on Hangzhou on Thursday.
According to AutoNavi, a web-based map and navigation service, the West Lake, Tiananmen Square and the ancient walled city of Pingyao in Shanxi province were the country’s most crowded tourist attractions.
Beijing, which was buffeted by gusts of up to 75km/h, saw tourists with 1.15 million visitors, a 13 per cent drop from last year, according to the Beijing Youth Daily.
National Day in the capital started with 70,000 people watching national flag raised over Tiananmen Square. The Palace Museum, the most popular location, sold its daily quota of 80,000 tickets by 1:20pm.
The number of visitors peaked at about 11:30am, with queues at 32 sales counters stretching 15 metres. Just 50 minutes later only 7,100 tickets remained. Meanwhile, the museum management made announced over loudspeakers to prevent people queuing unnecessarily.
However, the newspaper quoted unidentified official from the Beijing Tourism Commission as saying that Beijingers were making excursions further afield as the city’s parks and attractions, which used to be their most popular destinations, saw a 30 per cent drop in visitors from October 1 last year.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, police imposed traffic controls along the iconic Bund waterfront area, where a stampede on New Year’s Eve this year left 36 dead and 49 injured. Roads were changed to one-way traffic to prevent overcrowding, the Shanghai Morning Post reported.
By 9pm nearly 70,000 people had gathered in the Bund, the maximum capacity, so cars were diverted from the area and armed police set up human barricades to control access to the area.
The other popular attractions in the city, including the Oriental Pearl Broadcasting Tower, the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum and Shanghai Wild Animal Park, avoided overcrowding by restricting the numbers of visitors.
The Ministry of Public Security said highway traffic rose sharply in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei province, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta. There were no reports of major traffic congestion or long delays, and there were no traffic accidents involving more than five deaths.
Motor traffic to the Jianggangshan and Huaguoshan scenic areas in Jiangxi province rose 50 per cent and 65 per cent respectively over last year. The ministry expect more traffic in the coming days.
