Tibet is forecasting to receive at least five million tourists
in 2008, an official with the region's development and reform
commission said.
Jin Shixun, director with the Commission, said Tibet expected a
25 percent increase in tourists next year. They would push tourism
revenue in the autonomous region to six billion yuan (about 800
million U.S. dollars).
The commission estimated earlier that the region, with a total
population of 2.8 million, would receive a record-high 4.02 million
tourists in 2007, a 64 percent increase year-on-year. Tourism
revenues were forecast at 4.8 billion yuan.
Tibet's architectural icon, the Potala Palace, has received more
than one million tourists alone so far this year.
Tourism is Tibet's main industry. The region received 2.5
million tourists last year, earning 2.77 billion yuan in total
tourism revenue. This accounted for 9.6 percent of the region's
gross domestic product.
Jin attributed the surge in tourists mainly to the operation of
the Qinghai-Tibet Railway that was completed in July 2006.
Statistics show that in the first full year of operation of the
railway to this past June, more than 1.5 million visitors,
accounting for over half of the total tourists, took the train to
the region. Another 1.4 million arrived by air.
The 1,956-kilometer railway, built at cost of 33 billion yuan,
was the first railway to connect Tibet with the outside world.
From July 2006 to June this year, a total of 1.5 million people
had come to Tibet by train. Among those, more than a half were
tourists.
(Xinhua News Agency December 22, 2007)