Beijing’s got a popular new tourist attraction

A pair of pandas -- Zhizhi and Qiqi -- will be welcoming fans to the Beijing Garden Expo Park‘s Chengdu Park from now until Nov 18.

The expo is a new tourist destination that has proven popular with visitors from China and abroad and was providing them with some wonderful activities in the first month of a six-month garden festival. And the Chengdu Park is one of the most popular in the expo, with loads of visitors wanting to have a look of the adorable pandas.

They’ve been so popular, in fact, that their Garden Expo tour is being prolonged to Nov 18, when there will be a closing.

The Garden Expo welcomed 50,000 visitors on opening day, May 18,.and a half- month later recorded its 500,000th visitor, on June 1. There was a tourist peak during the Dragon Boat Festival with the number put at 75,000. The expo expects to see a significant increase in the number of visitors during the summer holiday.

The parade with floats started on Yinxing Avenue of the Garden Expo Park?at 10:30 am, is a real show-stopper, with more than 80 percent of the visitors crowding in at least half an hour earlier just to get a look at this attraction.

The floats and the costumes of the people and decorating on them, with some shining lights for the night shows give visitors a gala of light and music effects, from July to September.

Authorities say that the total number of passengers on the subway’s Line 14 was 670,000, from May 18 to June 13, with an average of 25,000 per day. There are 2,128 buses serving Garden Expo routes, with 26,209 visitors having benefited from the convenience already.

Estimates are, that 45 percent of the expo visitors got there by the subway or buses and “low carbon” are the key words for this expo.