Pictures Show Almost 30,000 Tourists On Mountain Hike In China

Pictures show nearly 30,000 tourists packed onto a popular mountain trail in China.

Mount Tai, which is on the outskirts of Tai'an in East China's Shandong Province, sold 29,000 visitor tickets, with tourists cramming along the trails to watch the sunrise this morning (Friday 1 May).

Asia Wire

The mountain is of historical and cultural significance in the country and is known as the eastern mountain of the Five Great Mountains of China.

The coronavirus pandemic that now grips the planet originated in the city of Wuhan in late 2019, but now the country is easing lockdown and nearly 70 percent of its registered scenic areas, including parks and zoos, are now open, the China National Tourism Administration announced.

While 29,000 people may have been shoulder to shoulder at Mount Tai, this is significantly less than normal.

The site sold only 25 percent of its regular daily maximum - with only online reservations rather than physical tickets - after the central government in Beijing issued strict orders for scenic areas to limit tourist capacity to no more than 30 percent amid concerns over the spread of Covid-19.

The national park also attempted to stagger entry and began restricting tourist flow when it reached 18,000 people.

Asia Wire

In early April, more than 62,000 people visited a lake in the east of the country in just one day. Photographs showed huge crowds of tourists piling into West Lake, a 10,000-hectare UNESCO World Heritage Site in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province.

Visitors flocked to the lake for the Qingming Festival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, which marked the first public holiday since the coronavirus outbreak swept the country.

As part of an initiative to get people back outside, 165,000 free tickets were offered to visitors to the park. But while park staff said the numbers were down on previous years, some 62,200 people still packed in to visit the lake on Sunday 5 April alone.

As well as the lake, the site also includes 16 other attractions which, over the course of the entire weekend, saw 760,000 people pass through the gates - almost the same number of people who visited last year (2019) in a single day in October (759,300).

Speaking about the festival, Fang Guoxing, director of the park's management committee, said they focused on online tickets this year, which helped reduce congestion and allowed visitors to undergo health screenings before entering the grounds.

Topics: World News, China

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

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