Jilin promotes tourism at Northeast Asia Expo

A wide variety of Jilin Province’s specialties ranging from Jilin City’s ula grass, Tonghua City’s wine and Baishan City’s agaric to Baicheng City’s reed painting and Changbai Mountain’s wild delicacies were showcased at Jilin Province’s tourism pavilion at the 11^th Northeast Asia Expo held from September 1 to 5.

The province’s Changbai Mountain, ice and snow scenery and folk customs were featured at the main booth of the pavilion.

Its various city-level jurisdictions also presented their distinctive tourism resources at the 192 professional booths within the pavilion.

In addition, the cities took turns to stage art performances and hand out discounted entry tickets, tourism commodities and souvenirs to visitors for half a day at the pavilion.

Quan Qifu, Vice Director of Siping Tourism Bureau, said the city’s art performance incorporated local revolutionary history, ice and snow scenery, folk customs into tourism.

“I’m so lucky to have got the entry ticket of a scenic area by simply answering a question posed by the host. I’ll visit the scenic area next weekend,” Xiao Ying from Jilin University of Arts said excitedly.

Interactive activities such as Q&A and games proved most effective in attracting visitors’interest.

The pavilion was divided into several sections, one for promoting Jilin’s tourism image, one for selling tourism commodities from foreign countries, and others for exhibiting minority ethnic group artworks, handicrafts and intangible cultural heritages respectively. Professional visitors as well as non-professional ones were able to learn about the province’s beautiful environment and colorful tourism products in a comprehensive way.

The section for selling tourism commodities from foreign countries attracted a big crowd. Zambia’s crystal, Canada’s deep-sea fish oil, Thailand’s latex pillow, South Korea’s cosmetics, Laos’tea and honey, and so forth were quite popular among visitors.

The sections for artworks and handicrafts were no less attractive.

“There are such a great variety of commodities on show here. I love to buy them all,” said local citizen Mr. Song. He and his wife had already bought a lot as seen by the shopping bags they were holding.“I bought them for our family members. For example, the pillow staffed with ula grass is very warm and comfortable and my daughter will surely like it. The bamboo-made slippers and shoe-pads are for my father-in-law, because they are light and cool and thus suitable for elderly people,”Song’s wife said.

Jilin’s intangible cultural heritages including New Year pictures, clay sculptures and reed paintings also garnered enormous attention.

“We sold more than 100 gourd paintings in quite a short time,” said a staff member at the booth for gourd paintings of Dongliao joyfully.

Rural families of Dongliao all grew guards, so guard painting were very famous.

“The cloth-made dolls, pillows and small pendants are well received,”a staff member at the booth for Songyuan’s Guoerluosi’s cloth products. The company had four stores in Songyuan and it hoped to spread its popularity beyond Songyuan.

The booth for Hu’s dough figurines also attracted a long queue. Characters in mythologies and fictions like Sun Wukong, Nezha and the Mermaid were presented to visitors in the form of dough figurines by skillful craftsmen.

“The dough figurines are so vivid and can be called art works,”said Mrs Li, who was visiting the exhibition with her granddaughter.

Dough figurines are made mainly of sticky rice dough dyed in different colors. Although they are easy to make, involving only hands and simple tools, they are folk crafts of high artistic value.

Jilin Tourism Radio Broadcast also live broadcast interviews with tourism chiefs of city-level jurisdictions, on-the-spot interactions at Jilin Province’s tourism pavilion and lottery draw among its listeners.