Endless traffic jams as early as 8 o´clock in the morning. Driveways full of people dodging the overcrowded walkways. Nearly half a million people visited the Sun-Yat Sen Mausoleum during the National Holidays.
This year, just as every year, tourism exploded in Nanjing during the “Golden week”. Over the first five days of the National Holiday 493,000 people visited the Sun-Yat Sen Mausoleum alone, hitting a visitor record and making it the most popular tourist attraction in Nanjing.
Although the number of people visiting the whole scenic area around the Mausoleum surpassed half a million, this did not represent an increase since last year; likely to do with the measures restricting the amount of visitors allowed on site. The area even had a waiting room for unlucky visitors that did not make it in on time. Meanwhile, those whom successfully entered the tourist attraction complained about not seeing the site over all the bobbing tourist heads. Some families even decided to bring along walkie talkies to make sure they could stay in contact if anyone got lost in the crowds, so they did not have to rely on the unstable mobile network.
The Mausoleum was however only one of Nanjing’s popular destinations during the Holidays. Yuhuatai had over 200,000 visitors in five days, more than 10 percent of the total number of visitors to the site in an entire year.
The 2,000 parking spaces around Confucius Temple were completely full and the Qinhuai River Cruise experienced a 30 percent increase in sailors compared to the year before, making it the highest number of all time, with a total of 210,000 passengers in a single day.
The only tourist attraction that actually dropped in popularity was Xuanwu Lake, with 190,000 visitors in the course of five days compared to 163,000 in only one day last year. Such numbers made it a great hiding place from the Golden Week rush and were clearly felt amongst tourists present.
“I was pleasantly surprised”, says Tong Li, a Marketing Graduate from King’s College, London. “I thought it would be packed during the National Holiday, but there are a lot less people about than I initially expected.”
