The inbound tourists to the Chinese mainland reached 109.04 million in 2004, breaking the 100 million mark for the first time.

This earned the foreign exchange revenue up to US$25.74 billion, according to statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics and the China National Tourism Administration on Thursday.

The inbound tourists mainly came from the 16 countries of Japan, the Republic of Korea, Russia, the United States, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, United Kingdom, Thailand, Australia, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, India and France. The number of visitor arrivals from these countries saw remarkable growth in 2004 over the previous year.

The outbound tourists from the Chinese mainland amounted to 28.85 million in 2004. Some 5.87 million Chinese mainland people traveled abroad for business purpose, up 8.55 percent compared with last year. More than 12.97 million mainlanders went abroad for private reasons, representing an increase of 55.15 percent over a year earlier.

Figures show that domestic tourism revenue totaled 471.1 billion yuan (US$58 billion) in the past year.

(Xinhua News Agency January 21, 2005)