Chinese on holidays

Dali's Main Tourist Street during Golden Holiday
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I read about a tourist attraction - unfortunately, I don't remember where I read it but it was a park, I'm sure about that fact - that was built around 500 AD in a Chinese city to attract tourists. That is many many centuries before anything similar in Europe.

Only few Chinese tourists make it to Europe so I assumed the Chinese have a similar relationship to work as the Japanese do (I hope no Japanese or Chinese is reading this) but instead the concept is well known and as it seems they have a rather long history of doing so. I was in China during the Golden Holiday, which is the week of the National Day (1 October) when everybody gets one week off. Yangshou being a popular (and probably socialistically planned) tourist spot was just cramped with tourists and hotel prices 3 times higher than during any other time of the year - this is probably where socialism (everybody gets holiday on the same week) and capitalism (a great demand leads to high prices) meet.

And more than 1500 years of touristic history

Queing up for a major tourist attraction in Yangshou - the Impression Light Show (really worthwhile the hassle)
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Of course it is not possible that really 100% of the people were on holiday that week and many can't afford it anyway. So the country still works despite "everybody" (= those that have a well paid job with regular working hours, i.e. people fom the big cities such as Peking, Shanghai, Shenzen,...) being on holiday.

Although everybody says it's crazy to visit China during the Golden Holidays, it is not. Actually, I think it was the best thing that happend to me. By the way, there are two more Golden Weeks - Chinese New Year and Labour Day (1 May).

Some Background information can be found on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Week_(China)