Chart of the Day: New Chinese-style travel during the Dragon Boat Festival

A new type of travel called "new Chinese-style travel" has sparked strong interest, especially among younger generations, during the Dragon Boat Festival, or Duanwu Festival, which falls on June 10 this year.

New Chinese-style travel refers to activities such as visiting history museums, watching Dragon Boat races, experiencing intangible cultural heritage, discovering historical and cultural scenic spots, and dressing in traditional Chinese attire hanfu.

During the festival, the top three popular museums are National Museum of China, Shaanxi History Museum and Zhejiang Museum of Natural History, according to Wutong Big Data of China Mobile. 

Wutong Big Data also showed that the top five provinces by number of spectators for Dragon Boat races are south China's Guangdong Province, central China's Hunan Province, southwest China's Guizhou Province, southeast China's Fujian Province and east China's Jiangxi Province. 

According to the data, the top five destinations for historical and cultural tourism are Beijing, south China's Guangdong Province, east China's Jiangsu Province, Zhejiang Province and Shandong Province. 

The number of cultural and tourism bookings during the festival has increased by nearly 70 percent year on year, as of June 1, according to China's e-commerce platform Meituan.

Popular intangible cultural heritage experiences during the festival include traditional operas in Beijing and Suzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, tea picking and appreciation in southeast China's Fujian Province, and tie-dye in central China's Hunan Province and southwest China's Yunnan Province, according to a report from the travel platform LY.COM.

The report indicated that the most popular destinations for hanfu dressing during the festival are Xi'an in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, Hangzhou in east China's Zhejiang Province, Luoyang in central China's Henan Province, Suzhou in east China's Jiangsu Province, and Chengdu in southwest China's Sichuan Province. 

Data from online commerce platform JD.com also showed that sales of adult hanfu sets jumped more than three-fold month on month since May 31.

The festival is a traditional Chinese holiday observed on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar to commemorates patriotic poet Qu Yuan of the State of Chu during the Warring States Period (475 BC-221 BC).

During the festival, people usually eat zongzi, a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves, watch the dragon boat races, make scented sachets, weave colorful ropes, hang mugwort and calamus, and drink realgar wine.