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The number of visits by overseas tourists to Guilin, a scenic city in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, hit a record 432,000 last year, according to local statistics.
This is the third year that the number of overseas visitors to the city had topped 400,000, said Chen Tingzheng, an official with the region's tourism administration.
Though European and American tourist numbers dropped temporarily after the terrorism attack in the United States on September 11, 2001, the city was now seeing a rise in tourists from those continents, the official said.
Tourists from Japan, the Republic of Korea and China's Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan had continued to increase steadily, and the number of those from Thailand and India had risen dramatically, the official said.
A quiet stone street called Xijie, or West Street, in Yangshuo,a town at Guilin, has become a must-see for overseas tourists, attracting around 1,000 daily.
(People's Daily January 16, 2003)
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