700,000+ people visited Shanghai tourist attractions on CNY Day

Photograph: Arisa Chattasa via Unsplash

A lot of people who stay in Shanghai during Chinese New Year describe the city as becoming 'a ghost town'. No people on the street, shops shuttered and an eerie, if not welcome, quiet hanging in the air. These people have obviously been nowhere near any tourist attractions at this time of year...

According to numbers from Shanghai's tourism authorities, reported by SHINE, Shanghai's biggest tourism spots attracted approximately 701,000 visitors on Tuesday 5, Chinese New Year's Day – for people who like to compare influxes of tourists to the populations of countries in Western Europe, that's nearly 100,000 more people than in the entirety of Luxembourg...

Visits to The Bund increased by nearly 55 percent from 2018 on CNY Day, with a staggering 208,000 people heading down to take in the skyline and welcome in the new year; while by 11am on Wednesday 6, more than 55,000 people had passed through the gates at Shanghai Disney, causing the average waiting time for rides to hit the two-hour mark. Doesn't sound like the happiest place on earth to us...

When you finally get on a ride at Disneyland (via GIPHY)

And speaking of queues, visitors were apparently waiting for up to 90 minutes to get onto Yu Garden's Jiuqu Bridge (which overlooks one of the main lantern displays as part of Yuyuan's annual festival), with the headcount reaching 51,000 before 11.30am on Wednesday. You know how the old saying goes: people mountain, people sea, people queue...

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