Mainland tourists arrive on historic flights to Taiwan

By Lydia Chen  |   2008-7-4  |     ONLINE EDITION

HUNDREDS of mainland tourists arrived in Taiwan today on the first regular weekend chartered flights in nearly six decades, marking a historic step toward a warming of relationships across the Strait.

The first of the flights, a China Southern Airlines plane, touched down at Taoyuan International Airport in northern Taiwan at 8:10am. The plane, with 230 passengers on board, took off from Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province at 6:31am.

The Airbus A330 was soon followed by a flight from the southern city of Xiamen that arrived at Taipei's Songshan city airport.

Shanghai Airlines flew in with the city's first weekend chartered flight landing at Taipei's Songshan Airport at 11:50am.

Today's flights carried 760 tourists from five mainland cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen and Nanjing on 10-day package tours to the island.

Shen Qiren, a 76-year-old from Shanghai, boarded a flight at 2pm at Pudong International Airport to head for Taiwan, a trip he said might be the last chance he has to see his foster mother. Mainland visitors have been banned from visiting the island for the past six decades.

"She raised me until I was 12 and then she went to Taiwan. I haven't seen her since," Shen said.

"I have always wanted to visit her and I signed up for a tour as soon as I learned about the opening-up of Taiwan tourism," Shen said.

The mainland visitors like Shen were greeted by groups of reporters, local officials, traditional dragon dances and sprays of water from fire trucks as they walked smiling through an archway of colored balloons.

The weekend flights was "a new start in the history of exchanges," Wang Yi, director of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, which oversees Taiwan relations, said this morning.