Newly Prosperous China Rediscovers the Joy of Travel

Li Yu came in a tour bus packed with friends and co-workers from northeastern China. Other buses parked outside the Wild Goose Pagoda here on a recent afternoon carried visitors from China’s far west, from the booming eastern coast and from the deep south.

Except for a visiting reporter, there was not a foreigner in sight.

“Now that I have a chance to travel,” said Li, 23, an oil field worker from Daqing in northern Heilongjiang province, “I would feel embarrassed if I didn’t come to the ancient capital of the Sui and Tang dynasties.”

China’s history and literature are full of travelers’ tales. The towering Wild Goose Pagoda was built in AD 652 to house the Buddhist scriptures of a traveling monk, Xuan Zang, who brought them back from a trip to India. The manuscripts later became the basis of China’s great picaresque classic “Journey to the West.”

Under decades of Communist rule here, travel was severely restricted for most Chinese. During the early stages of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, young Red Guards rode the rails free, waving little red books from train windows and spreading the gospel of Maoism. But most Chinese still had to show written permission from their work unit before they could buy a ticket.

When the restrictions were eased in the early 1980s, few families had the money for leisure travel. But the past few years of rapid economic growth have been marked by an explosion of both domestic and overseas tourism from all parts of China.

In 1996, 2.4 million Chinese traveled abroad at their own expense, mostly to Hong Kong and to neighboring Asian countries with large ethnic Chinese populations, but also increasingly to North America and Europe.

But the biggest growth has been in domestic tourism.

“For us, the domestic tourism business began to take off in about 1992,” said Liu Xiaoling, 34, manager of the Xian Youth Travel Service here. “Before that time, we handled mostly foreigners.”

Chinese travel on domestic airlines is increasing by more than 20% a year, jumping from fewer than 20 million passengers in 1992 to more than 40 million last year.

According to Beijing’s Financial News journal, revenue from domestic tourism totaled $19 million, almost double that gained from foreign tourists.

China now has an estimated 5,000 tourist agencies. Traditionally frugal at home, Chinese tourists spend freely when traveling.

“There’s a Chinese saying,” Liu said.

“ ‘Impoverished at home, wealthy on the road.’ ”

In Beijing, the most popular tourist destination, travelers jam the lower-priced tourist hotels, peer into the tombs of the Ming emperors and stroll the ramparts of the Great Wall. In the far northern city of Harbin, once part of Russia, southerners who have seen snow only in pictures bundle up to view colorfully lighted ice sculptures.

In Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou (formerly Canton) they flock to theme parks that often are tiny worlds in themselves, with miniature replicas of the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids of Egypt.

Hoping to cash in on the tourist boom, the remote, mountainous province of Qinghai even offers package tours to the formerly top-secret “Nuclear City”--in the grasslands 100 miles from the provincial capital Xining--where the country’s first atomic weapons were developed.

The enterprising Liu, a smartly dressed woman who operates her business from a small hotel here, offers tours that include camel rides in Inner Mongolia, trips down the Yellow River and dune skiing in the Lake Shahu region.

Her most successful recent promotion, she said, urges affluent middle-class couples to treat their parents to a trip to China’s historic landmarks.

“We call it our ‘Love and Filial Piety’ package,” Liu said. “So far we’ve sold 5,000 packages. It’s so successful we can’t even handle all the business.”

Tempest was recently on assignment in Xian.