Yichang enjoys busy Dragon Boat Festival

By Chen Si.

During the three-day Dragon Boat Festival, Yichang saw a boost in tourism, dining, and shopping, with fatty fish and zongzi among the top favorites for both tourists and out-of-town visitors.

Sanxia International Airport handled 226 flights, moving around 23,500 passengers. Among them were about 700 foreign passengers, mainly from Thailand and Vietnam.
 

Tourists in Jiuge Alley, Zigui County. Photo by Peng Qiang

This year's Dragon Boat Festival coincided with Children's Day, prompting many parents to travel with their children. Alongside popular routes to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, flights to Zhuhai, Haikou, Quanzhou, Qingdao and Kunming also saw notable growth, with an average seat occupancy rate of 88 percent.

During the holiday, Yichang Railway Section served 184,000 passengers, with 86,000 at Yichang East Railway Station alone. The section operated an average of 269 trains per day, including Yichang East Railway Station, which operated 235 trains daily - 1.3 times its usual number.

More than 200 trains run between Wuhan and Yichang from 5 am to 10 pm daily, with a train running every four minutes during peak hours.

In addition, during the holiday, 10 key accommodation and catering enterprises in the city reached sales of 2.38 million yuan (US$330,000), up 10.5 percent year-on-year.

Local zongzi sales also boomed, thanks to e-commerce campaigns and increased media exposure. More than 200,000 zongzi have been sold online, a 20 percent year-on-year increase.

Li Lingling, general manager of Qugu Trading (a subsidiary of Qugu International Agricultural Group), said that their Zigui navel orange zongzi have reached over 20 foreign markets, including Southeast Asia and Europe.

Gao Tianjun, chairman of the Zijiren Catering Chain Management Co. said that during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, nine Zijiren restaurants in the urban area sold an average of 500 servings of fatty fish per day.

Shen Bin, secretary general of the Yichang Cooking and Hotel Industry Association added, "Yichang red oil baozi and fatty fish were very popular during the festival. More than 10,000 people had a taste of Yichang fatty fish each day."

According to official statistics, urban restaurants sold at least 20,000 kilograms of fatty fish per day during the festival.

In addition to tourism and food, the city’s 11 commercial complexes recorded sales of approximately 72 million yuan during the Dragon Boat Festival, a year-on-year increase of nearly 25 percent.

Song Xiaoxiao, Wang Tingitng, Deng Yuqin, Dou Changcui, Yang Chunyan and Xu Jinfeng contributed to this story.