Kaifeng's Holiday Crush: Why a Fourth-Tier City Fills With Tourists
Kaifeng was once the capital of the Northern Song dynasty, a city of perhaps a million people that traders and envoys described as the busiest place on earth. Today it is a modest prefecture-level city in Henan province, the agricultural heartland of central China, and it is not the sort of place a foreign visitor usually puts on a first itinerary. Yet over the 2026 National Day holiday, its two best-known attractions were among the most-visited in the whole province.
The numbers tell the story. Henan’s 4A-rated and higher scenic areas — the second tier in China’s official grading system, just below the top 5A rank — received 1.833 million visitors during the holiday week. Among the top five by footfall were the Qingming Riverside Landscapes park, a recreated Song-era streetscape built around a famous scroll painting, and the Wansuishan martial-arts park. Staff at Wansuishan barely paused: its official account posted seven separate crowd-cap notices between October 1 and October 4, and workers told visitors that queue times depended on the crowd and that tickets would stop being sold once they ran out.
On social media, one comment summed up the mood and went viral: the sea of people had become literal. That line captures what is actually on sale here. Kaifeng is not competing with Xi’an or Beijing on monuments. It is competing on atmosphere — costumed performers, staged fights, night markets selling soup dumplings and grilled skewers — and on the fact that a family can walk in, watch a show and feel they got their money’s worth without booking months ahead.
This is the wider pattern in Chinese domestic travel. The country’s holiday calendar concentrates movement into a handful of windows, and the 2027 schedule, already published, restores a nine-day Spring Festival break. When everyone travels at once, mid-tier cities with strong local identity and cheap tickets absorb overflow from the marquee destinations. Kaifeng sits a short high-speed rail ride from Zhengzhou, the provincial capital and a major rail hub, which makes it an easy add-on rather than a commitment.
The crowding also has a cost. Seven cap notices in four days means the park was repeatedly at capacity, and visitors who arrived without tickets were turned away. Locals have grown used to their old city being impassable in early October. For the parks, though, the economics are hard to argue with: a packed holiday week can carry a venue through a slow winter.
For an international traveler, the practical lesson is timing. Kaifeng’s appeal is real — the Song dynasty heritage, the night food streets, the recreated waterways — but its peak days are among the busiest in China. Go in spring or late autumn on an ordinary weekday and the same streets that held a crush in October will hold a stroll.
What to watch next is whether Kaifeng can convert holiday crowds into year-round demand, the way some smaller Chinese cities have tried to do with a single viral attraction. Ticket sales are one measure; hotel occupancy in January would be a better one.