China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) recorded 7.73 million visitor arrivals in the first half of the year, an increase of 52.6 percent on the same period last year, according to the latest figures released by the Macao Statistics and Census Bureau.

The bureau attributed the strong increase mainly to the growing arrival number of individual mainland Chinese tourists visiting Macao, with an extended implementation of the mainland's facilitated individual travel (FIT) scheme on Hong Kong and Macao-bound tours after it was first announced in July last year.

With a population of 451,000, the gaming city is welcoming a summer tourist boom. It hosted 1.3 million visitor arrivals in June, reaching a daily average of 43,358 tourists from China's mainland which made up 57.7 percent of all arrivals.

The total number of tourist arrivals in the first six months was even slightly higher than the number recorded for the whole of 1999, when Macao returned to the motherland and the Macao SAR government was established.

The number of mainlanders visiting Macao rose by a massive 96.3 percent in the first half of the year as compared with the same period of last year.
 
(Xinhua News Agency July 21, 2004)