The Taipei City Government will send out 40,000 free travel guide booklets to local travel centers, targeting people from Hong Kong and other Chinese-language speakers, including Chinese tourists, who could be allowed to visit Taiwan individually by the end of the year.
The Fun Taipei travel guide, which introduces 20 different tour routes in Taipei City, is only available in traditional Chinese. The city government denied Chinese tourists are the booklets’ only target, saying that it did not produce English or Japanese version of the travel guide due to budgetary constraints.
“The targets of this travel guide booklet include tourists from Hong Kong, Singapore and countries that use Chinese, as well as local tourists. Of course, we hope the booklet will be useful for independent Chinese tourists when they are allowed to come,” Tuo Chung-hwa (脫宗華), head of the Taipei City Department of Information and Tourism, said when asked about the lack of foreign language versions of the travel guide.
Tuo said the department has issued many English and Japanese travel guides on Taipei for foreign tourists in the past and will publish Japanese and English versions of the Fun Taipei travel guide by the end of this year or early next year.
Statistics from the department show that about four million tourists visit Taipei annually, half from Chinese-speaking countries.
Among the Chinese-speaking countries, most visitors come from Hong Kong, followed by Malaysia and Singapore. Most of the non-Chinese-speaking foreign visitors to Taipei are Japanese, according to the statistics.
As the government plans to allow independent Chinese tourists visit Taiwan in December or early next year, Tuo said Taipei City is already working with Shanghai to promote tourism and will offer more in-depth travel information aimed at independent Chinese tourists.
At present, Chinese tourists are only allowed to visit Taiwan with tour groups. The government initially plans to let in a maximum of 300 to 500 per day when the new regulations go into effect.
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