China’s inbound travel kept climbing through the 2026 National Day holiday, helped by a wider visa-free circle, an instant departure-tax refund and easy mobile payment. The trip many visitors now want reaches past the landmark photograph. Under a tag spreading online as “Chinamaxxing”, more of them ask for a slice of ordinary Chinese life: a lidded-bowl tea in a park, a walk along a neighbourhood lane, an afternoon spent the way locals spend it.
Alipay Numbers Behind the Rush
Payment data gives the surge a size. Alipay reported that spending by inbound visitors through its foreign-card binding and its Alipay+ service rose by close to 50 percent year on year over the holiday, with the fourth day of the break the busiest. The ten cities where inbound visitors spent most were Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Jinhua, Chongqing, Nanjing and Suzhou.
The fastest growth, though, came from smaller places: Meishan, Zaozhuang, Heihe, Yanbian, Sanya, Zhangjiajie, Mudanjiang, Jining, the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao autonomous prefecture, and Jilin. Heading that list was Meishan, in Sichuan, the hometown of the Three Su and their Dongpo legacy, where inbound spending climbed by more than 400 percent.
Smaller Cities Lead the Growth
Inbound spending is also spreading down the ranks of destinations, matching a pattern already visible in the domestic market, where holiday demand has moved the same way. Zheng Zili, a researcher at the Hunan Academy of Social Sciences, noted that the dividend from visa-free policies keeps releasing and that the measures easing travel are showing their effect; this holiday, he said, different places matched their own resources to the distinct tastes of overseas visitors and worked together to open up inbound spending.
Flight demand follows the same pull. Data from HopeGoo, part of the travel platform Tongcheng, showed bookings on routes from Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Moscow to mainland cities such as Nanjing and Hangzhou up by more than 20 percent, with some routes up by more than 80 percent.
Tea, Parks and a Matchmaking Corner
In Chengdu the trend took on local colour. Rather than chase the usual photo spots, foreign visitors drifted into the places locals use, and People’s Park filled with National Day performances staged by residents themselves, traditional song and dance drawing small crowds of onlookers who stood and listened even without following the lyrics.
Lucas, a visitor from Spain on his first trip to China, said the scene was a fine way to meet a place and its traditions. Valentine, from France, added that the busy centres of the world tend to look alike and that only the corners where people actually live show a country as it is.
Lidded-bowl tea is the emblem of that Chengdu day: in teahouses across the city visitors take a seat, lift the lid and slow down. Cam, from Chile, said using public space this way, for tea and talk and rest in a park, is a good thing, and nothing like the feel of a commercialised attraction; his companion Felipe Lastra put it just as plainly, saying that under a tree at an outdoor teahouse a person can finally relax. Walking the lanes, some noticed the matchmaking corner that residents have built on their own, and read it as a window into how older generations here approach marriage; Yevgeny, from Russia, said such everyday scenes feel fresher than the standard sights, while Karen, from Canada, said she found them entirely new, and that following locals into dance and tai chi in the park had reset her impression of the country.
On the Chinese side, the same holiday saw two-way traffic. Trip.com data showed Chinese bookings to Europe up by a double-digit margin and European bookings to China doubling; trips to Italy rose by about 60 percent and to Spain by nearly 40 percent, while visitors from both countries to China grew by roughly 1.5 times. Among inbound bookings, the share going to cultural sites rose to about 43 percent from roughly 32 percent in 2024; the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall saw inbound orders grow by nearly four times, and the Forbidden City and the Terracotta Warriors each by more than 1.3 times.
Heritage experiences inside the parks drew visitors too. On October 1 at the Nanshan cultural tourism area in Sanya, Hainan, foreign tourists tried the bamboo-pole dance, one frame of a Chinamaxxing holiday. A lidded-bowl tea, a park bench, a matchmaking corner, a bow before Confucius in Hanfu at Qufu: these are the scenes visitors now travel for, and the ones they carry home to share.
