China sees surge in return trips as Dragon Boat Festival wraps up

China

China sees surge in return trips as Dragon Boat Festival wraps up

2025-06-02 16:43 Last Updated At：21:57

Chinese holidaymakers are making return trips in surging numbers, as this year's three-day Dragon Boat Festival break draws to a close on Monday.

Passengers trips by rail are expected to hit 17.9 million on the last day of the annual holiday, according to official estimates.

Nationwide, the China State Railway Group has added 1,279 trains to handle Monday's travel rush.

Notably, the China Railway Guangdong Group expects to handle over 2.37 million passenger trips, an increase of 9.3 percent from the last day of the traditional holiday in 2024, with 92 overnight high-speed trains added on Tuesday to meet the travel demand.

Meanwhile, air passenger trips are estimated to reach 1.97 million on Monday.

The country's civil aviation sector expects to handle a total of 5.6 million passenger trips during this year's holiday from May 31 to June 2.

The country's expressways also expect to see heavy traffic on Monday afternoon, with the peak hours lasting from 16:00 to 18:00.

The Dragon Boat Festival, also known as Duanwu Festival, falls on the fifth day of the fifth month on the Chinese lunar calendar, with celebrations ranging from eating rice dumplings to watching dragon boat races.

The festival fell on May 31 this year.

China launches Shenzhou-23 manned spaceship

China's Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country's northwest on Sunday, sending three astronauts to its orbiting space station.

The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, lifted off from the launch site at 23:08 Beijing Time (15:08 GMT).

The crew members consist of mission commander Zhu Yangzhu, and fellow astronauts Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying, who is also the first astronaut from China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

In another notable first, one of the crew members is set to undertake a year-long stay aboard the space station, double the usual duration of previous Shenzhou missions.

After entering orbit, the Shenzhou-23 spaceship will perform a fast automated rendezvous and docking with the radial port of the space station core module Tianhe, forming a combination of three modules and three spacecraft.

Shenzhou-23 marks the 40th flight of China's manned spaceflight program and the seventh manned flight mission since the Tiangong space station entered its application and development phase in late 2022.