Dali, a region famous for the Cangshan Mountain, Erhai Lake and its Bai ethnic culture, received some 4.23 million tourist visits during the Lunar New Year holiday, up 219 percent year-on-year, with tourism revenue(收入) growing 162 percent to 3.16 billion yuan ($465 million), according to data from the local culture and tourism bureau.
Why did so many people come there? It was partly because of Dali’s romantic life vividly showed in the popular television soap opera Meet Yourself, in which the character, an urban white-collar worker quits her job and moves to a bed-and-breakfast in a small town in Dali following the death of her best friend, where during the course of many ups and downs, she regains the courage to live.
A week after the show was first screened in early January, searches for Dali doubled on online travel agency Fliggy, and those for Shaxi ancient town, where many of the scenes were shot, surged 10-fold, while associated keywords became top searches on Sina Weibo on multiple occasions.
Brian Linden, a 60-year-old from the United States who runs the Linden Center Hotel in Xizhou town in Dali, said that he and his colleagues were busy receiving tourists from around the world during the festival. “Between 500 to 800 tourists have come to visit every day and our courtyard is open to everyone. We had to control the flow of people so that our guests would not be affected,” he said, adding that some of the show’s scenes were shot in his hotel, and many tourists wanted to have a look.
Linden added that all the rooms had been fully booked before the festival, and the hotel was expecting revenues higher than the festivals of the last two years combined. It was offering guests a variety of experiences, including tie-dyeing(扎染) and dragon dancing, and about a quarter of the bookings were non-Chinese.
“Many Chinese and foreigners have returned to people-to-people exchanges, which are a good opportunity to learn the true story of China,” said Linden.
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