Thursday, January 30, 2014

Happy Chinese New Year

Slate:
Millions of Chinese are currently heading to their hometowns (yes, yes, mock away) for the Lunar New Year—the world’s largest annual human migration. Last year, a total of 3.4 billion trips were taken, 3.1 billion of them by road. In total, 35.5 million people traveled by air, 43 million by boat. To put that number in perspective, only a little more than 3 million people in total went on Hajj to Mecca in 2012.
Baidu, China’s largest search engine, created the stunning map above showing the migration for the 40-day festival. As Smart Planet describes it, the map was “created using data taken from users of its location-based applications to calculate and analyze the mass migration of the population during the Spring Festival. The map shows the travel routes and their popularity.” If you click into the interactive version, you can get data for specific cities (in Chinese only.)
And we think Thanksgiving is a huge travel holiday.  Now I want to set off some fireworks.

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