Some sites limit visitors in flood of holiday tourists

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MAJOR tourist destinations around China are witnessing travel peaks amid the eight-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays that run through Sunday.

In Beijing, the Palace Museum, or the Forbidden City, attracted 182,000 tourists on Tuesday, the biggest number on a single day, as millions of visitors arrived in the national capital. Earlier, from Sunday noon to midday Monday, garbage collected at Tian'anmen Square in the heart of the city amounted to 7.9 tons, a quarter more than that in the same period of last year.

In the eastern coastal city of Qingdao, its top five major tourist sites attracted more than 200,000 visitors on Tuesday.

Yesterday, thousands of vehicles jammed two 20-kilometer mountain roads winding to and out of the Lushan Mountain scenic area in the eastern province of Jiangxi. The area, with about 3,000 car parking spaces, was unable to cope with at least 8,000 inbound cars, said Jiang Renfa, head of the Lushan Mountain public security bureau.

The Lushan Mountain tourism administration temporarily stopped selling entrance tickets to prevent the traffic from growing on Tuesday afternoon. Similar measures could be taken during the rest of the holidays, a police officer said.

Emergency measures have been launched at other scenic sites. At Huashan Mountain in Shaanxi Province, where tourists were trapped on mountaintop a day earlier, no more than 800 tickets were sold each hour yesterday.

Fearing that tourist sites might become too crowded, many people are staying at home, going shopping or making brief suburban excursions.

A resident surnamed Wang in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi, canceled long-distance travel plans after learning of heavy traffic on many highways during the first two days of the holidays. Instead, Wang, his wife and son went fishing at a reservoir in the suburbs before having a picnic.

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