Cemeteries break visitor record

A record 3.46 million residents visited the city's public cemeteries Saturday for Tomb-Sweeping Day, up 14.5 percent from last year, the Shanghai Morning Post reported Sunday.

Chinese people traditionally visit the graves of their dead relatives and ancestors for the holiday, known as the Qingming Festival, which falls around April 5 each year. The national government declared the festival a public holiday in 2008 to preserve the tradition, which involves cleaning the gravestones and paying one's respects to the departed.

The holiday has also become a reason to travel. More than 2 million tourists were transported by the Shanghai Railway Bureau Saturday, the first day of the three-day holiday weekend. The number of people traveling by rail on the day of the festival rose 37.8 percent from last year, reaching a new record high, according to a report in the Laodong Daily.

Train passengers took more than 1.5 million trips in the region overseen by the Shanghai Railway Bureau, which includes Shanghai and nearby cities in Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, the report said.

The railway bureau scheduled 121 additional trains Saturday to accommodate the spike in passengers, according to a bureau press release.

A total of 83,200 passengers flew in or out of Shanghai Pudong International and Shanghai Hongqiao International airports on Saturday, up 34 percent from last year's holiday, according to a press release from the Shanghai Airport Frontier Inspection Station.

With most Chinese people busy with their holiday duties, only 40 percent of the passengers flying overseas were from the Chinese mainland.

The most popular destinations over the weekend were Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea, though many residents from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan flew to Shanghai for the holiday.

Of all the city's sightseeing spots, tourists most favored Xujiahui, which received 2.55 million visitors over the holiday weekend, followed by the Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street with 2.4 million, according to a press release from the Shanghai Holiday Tourism Office. Next came the Bund with 1.5 million visitors and then Yuyuan Garden with 810,000.

The Shanghai Wild Animal Park received 79,800 tourists during the holiday weekend, about 4.5 times more than it received during last year's holiday. Century Park received 123,500 tourists, about triple what it received last year.