More than 800 students from 16 senior high schools in Taiwan visited the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo Tuesday, with their admission tickets presented to them by Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng.

The Taiwanese students are in Shanghai to take part in a summer camp along with students from senior high schools in the Shanghai area.

Huang Yu-I, principal of the Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School, who is one of the chief organizers of the summer camp, told CNA that the Taiwanese students visited the China Pavilion before going to the Taiwan Pavilion.

Afterward, she said, some of the Taiwanese students went to the World Expo’s Puxi area, where the Taipei Pavilion is located. The students were then allowed to visit various other exhibition sites of their own choice.

According to Huang, the students are being provided with free meals and accommodation during the camp. Each student was also given World Expo coupons worth 200 Chinese yuan (US$29.50) that can be used for buying food and gifts at the Expo.

Huang said the summer camp, which will include a forum scheduled for July 22, will help broaden the Taiwanese students’ visions and knowledge through one-to-one communications with their Shanghai counterparts.

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JIUZHAIGOU, CHINA — By noon, the tour buses that ply the length of this U-shaped limestone valley are packed tight. Elbows are up. People are pushing.

“Are you going to walk?” someone hollers.

“Don’t bump!” comes the reply.

It’s a common scene in any major Chinese city, but here in northern Sichuan Province, 10 hours by bus from Chengdu, the crowds are surrounded by karst peaks and turquoise pools, not high-rise buildings and freeways.

Each day, tens of thousands of Chinese tourists board buses to visit the pine forests and mock-ethnic villages of Jiuzhaigou, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Admission costs 320 renminbi, or $47. For 25 renminbi more, visitors can rent a bejeweled, Tibetan-inspired costume and have their pictures taken by a local.

These sightseers, clad in Gore-Tex and Gucci, are fueling a boom in China’s domestic travel sector. Spurred by a mix of middle-class money, government support and interest in rediscovering China, the market is beating predictions and bucking global trends.

While the industry lost ground in Europe and the United States, China’s tourism sector posted a 9 percent jump in revenue 2009, to 1.26 trillion renminbi, thanks to domestic demand.

In 2010, total tourism revenue is expected to rise 14 percent, totaling 1.44 trillion renminbi, according to figures released Jan. 24 in state media reports.

“There is clearly an upward trend, a huge upward trend,” said Nancy Cockerell, a policy adviser at the World Travel and Tourism Council. “For the next 10 years, China will be leading the way.”

Though Chinese people have been on the move for centuries — as explorers, migrants and traders — leisure travel is relatively new to the People’s Republic. The post-Mao era afforded little time for holidays, and for most, money was scarce. The state regulated travel between provinces, so would-be wanderers needed papers and permission, in addition to cash.

As China’s economy began to gain momentum in the 1990s, the travel industry benefited. The number of domestic trips jumped 54 percent from 1996 to 2006, according to figures released by the China National Tourism Administration.

Higher incomes have driven up leisure travel, but the government has helped, too. As average incomes climbed, the state eased travel restrictions and increased the number of mandatory public holidays to 11 to drive demand.

Since 1999, Chinese workers have enjoyed “golden weeks,” a set of mandatory national holidays. There are now two per year, one held in autumn and one in winter.

The purpose is to get people spending — a strategy that seems to be working. During the National Day Golden Week holidays from Oct. 1 to Oct. 8 last year, 19.6 million tourists visited Sichuan Province alone, generating 7.7 billion renminbi in revenue, according to state media.

Nationally, tourism revenue has been climbing for more than a decade, and more people than ever are traveling.

The National Tourism Administration said domestic tourists had made 1.9 billion trips in 2009, an increase of 11 percent over the previous year, and generated 1 trillion renminbi of revenue, up 15 percent from the previous year.

But Ms. Cockerell of the World Travel and Tourism Council said the sector still had room to grow.

“For China, two billion trips is small,” she said. “When they start traveling like Americans, the numbers will be phenomenal.”

The world’s largest travel Web site, Tripadvisor, shares her optimism. In October, it said it had purchased Kuxun.cn, a Chinese flight and hotel search engine, as part of plans to invest $50 million in China through 2011.

Peripheral industries stand to benefit as well. With the rise of mass tourism comes the development of what Tim Winter, editor of “Asia on Tour: Exploring the Rise of Asian Tourism,” calls “travel culture.”

In China, travel culture means big money, he said: “People want the travel uniform; they want the gear.”

For sightseers who want more gear, the shops are ready to help. Visitors to the gift shop near the main cafeteria of the Jiuzhaigou National Park can purchase fox fur stoles (1,400 renminbi), faux fur hats (80 renminbi) or plastic back scratchers (30 renminbi).

Outside the park gates, rows of shops sell high-end travel equipment, including brand-name jackets, digital cameras and the latest in luggage.

Suitably attired, visitors to this once remote region can choose from dozens of hotels, including a Sheraton and an Intercontinental. At night, charter buses ferry guests to Tibetan shows, where, for about $25, they are treated to live music, dancing and food.

Leading the spending spree are China’s young urbanites. Overworked, wealthy and worldly, they have the means to travel and the desire to get away from city life.

“There are skyscrapers everywhere in Shanghai, but here there is natural landscape,” said Allen Zhang, a newlywed touring the park with his wife, Christine Xiong.

“Travel is a completely new lifestyle for us,” he added. “My father’s generation didn’t have the opportunity to travel.”

Mr. Zhang does, so he and Ms. Xiong flew to Sichuan to shoot their wedding pictures at Swan Lake, an algae-green pool famous for its glassy surface.

She stood by the water’s edge in a gauzy, white wedding gown; he beheld his bride through the lens of a tripod-mounted digital SLR.

They plan to travel every season, they said, and explore the country’s far reaches. “China is just a pretty, beautiful place,” Mr. Zhang said.

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A photographer shoots up close a replica Terracotta warrior coated with chocolate powder during a press event for the World Chocolate Wonderland theme park in Beijing, China, on Friday.

Chocoholics, rejoice!  A chocolate theme park opens next week in Beijing that will feature life-size replicas of the Terracotta warriors and a slice of the Great Wall of China.

The 215,000-square-foot “chocolate wonderland” opens Jan. 29 near the Olympic stadium.

“Even though chocolate in China is not as popular as it is in Western countries, we hope to promote the chocolate culture and market in China,” Zheng Yaoting, general manager of the firm running the park, tells the Global Times.

The newspaper says the chocolate items will be displayed at five temperature-controlled indoor areas and two outdoor sites.

Park organizers hope to lure a million visitors before April, when warm weather can be downright discouraging for chocolate products. It will reopen in January with new displays.

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Four Manalapan High School students and science teacher Heather Sullivan have returned from a 15-day trip to China, where they studied kung fu at a martial arts school, rode in rickshaws, and scaled the Great Wall of China.

The all-expense paid trip was organized by Discovery Student Adventures, the Discovery Channel’s new division that coordinates international travel for students in grades 5-12.

Sullivan and two other teachers were chosen from more than 170 educator applicants nationwide to pilot the program’s excursion to China. Each teacher was asked to select four students to experience the adventure as well.

Sullivan chose students Cory Bolotsky, 17, Kim Gennaro, 17, Caitlyn Silk, 17, and Drew Regino, 16. The other two teachers and eight students were from Wisconsin and California.

The Manalapan students are all starting their senior year of high school this week.

Sullivan applied for the trip because of her involvement in the Discovery Educator Network, which connects teachers who are passionate about integrating technology into the classroom to other educators.

“I never believed I would get picked to go abroad,” Sullivan said. “I didn’t tell anyone else that I applied for the trip either. Once I found out we were picked in March, things started happening very quickly. I had to choose which students I wanted to bring, ask their parents’ permission, and secure our passports and visas.”

Sullivan said Bolotsky, Gennaro, Silk and Regino were selected because they are good ambassadors for Manalapan and for America. They are confident, well-spoken, and able to absorb and communicate their cultural experiences with others, she said.

As part of the pilot program, the students were required to use the Internet to write daily about their activities, using blogs and Twitter, a microblogging service.

Silk blogged, ” … We made dumplings in different shapes … I can’t wait to show everyone my cooking skills when I get home!”

The students’ blogs and tweets can still be read at http://dsachina.blogspot.com.

Bolotsky concurred, saying, “Chinese food in China is nothing like Chinese food in America.”

The students said their most memorable moments including sampling duck brain and scorpion.

“Scorpion tastes like a crunchy french fry,” Regino reminisced.

Other culturally enlightening experiences included visiting the “Bird’s Nest,” which was the Olympic Stadium that played host to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing; experiencing a day in the life of a Shaolin monk; and visiting the home of a Chinese family to learn about culture and calligraphy.

The students also learned how to sing the song “Shaolin, Shaolin” in Chinese and presented it to their kung fu instructors and warrior monks.

The guests from the United States were surprised as to how different the Chinese education system is from the American education system. After visiting a school, the Americans learned that most Chinese students attend boarding school year-round and only return home for a spring holiday.

“I feel really grateful for my education … that I get such a good education,” Silk said.

Bags have been unpacked and passports have been put away, but the students said their experiences in the Far East will stay with them forever.

Their teacher, Sullivan, said, “I have much more legitimacy when teaching 21st century skills in my classes. Anywhere you can go outside of your own comfort zone helps you. When you understand more, you can share better.”

Gennaro agreed with Sullivan, saying, “I appreciate everything I have more now. I’m much more culturally aware.”

The students want to share their enthusiasm about their trip and Chinese culture with others. They encourage any school or group that is interested in hearing about their trip to contact Sullivan at hsullivan@frhsd.com to schedule a presentation.

Sullivan said, “We want people to know that if you keep connections with others who are excited about the same things you are, you can go far.”

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