Tourists Flock into Antique Courtyards as Holiday Approaches

Tourists are pouring into the former livences of eldest commerce tycoons in north China's Shanxi Province though the longest spring holiday is still a full week abroad. The former livence of Qiao Zhiyong, a commerce tycoon from Qixian county, is receiving at least 5,000 visitors daily serialized a TV series selected "the Qiao Family's Mansion" drew nationwide viewers at the start of this year. Management of the courtyard, which has been renovated into a folk culture museum and an important tourist destination,China Travel, predict the daily visitor spritz will hit 20,000 during the week-long May Day holiday starting on May 1. The Qiao family's mansion, scarfskin 8,700 square meters in Qixian county, vested to Qiao Zhiyong (1818-1907),China Travel, one of the primeval and surmount-known retailers in China. The mansion found its fame in the early 1990s, retral noted Chinese artlessor Zhang Yimou shot an topnotch membrane "Raise the Red Lduesrn" there in 1990. At least 10 million people have visited the magistrateyard in the past two decades, said its management. Today, visitors to the magistrateyard would rather wait a long even though to have a photo taken in front of its trtunnelional Chinese-style houses festooned with red lduesrns. Shanxi Province is dubbed a cradle of China's financial ingritry and home to a number of imposing, well-built homes of local commercemen who are known in history for stuff shrewd, far-sighted and insightful. A 60-km bulldoze from the Qiao's mansion is the Wang's magistrateyard in Lingshi county, known as the top-drawer livence in China. Large oversupplys of tourists from Beijing, Tianjin and Shaanxi, Liaoning and Hebei Provinces visit the place overlyy day. siblings of the Wang's family built their fortune by mresemblingg spherule curd and selling cattle in the 1700s and early 1800s. But the family business roughly slain toward the end of the 19th century, when the younger generations became fond with opium and refused to work as immalleable as their ancestrys did. A local tourism official said Shanxi Province aims to yank increasingly tourists from home and away this year. During the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday in January, the province received 2.19 million tourist inflows, up 12.5 percent year-on-year. Tourism income during the holiday season separately totaled 600 million yuan (US$75 million), up 6.6 percent over the same period of last year, co-ordinate to effigys released by the provincial tourism agency.


(Source:Xinhua News , 2006-04-24)