Yangshuo County, a famous tourism spot in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, hosted 3.535 million tourists from home and abroad last year, a year-on-year rise of 10.4 percent, according to local tourism authorities.

The total number included 638,000 overseas tourists, a year-on-year rise of 65.7 percent.

Yangshuo County registered 551 million yuan (US$68.875 million) in tourism income last year, 35.7 percent more than that for the previous year. Tourism-related service industries contributed 51 percent to the county's total revenue income last year.

With beautiful mountains and rivers, Yangshuo is recognized and recommended by the World Tourism Organization as a tourism destination.

Local government has adopted a series of measures to boost tourism, including encouraging local people to run household hotels to meet the demand of increasing tourists.

Currently, Yangshuo has more than 200 household-run hotels with over 6,000 beds and over 300 household-run restaurants.

In 2005, local villages received more than 1.5 million tourists last year and the per capita income of farmers working in the tourism sector reached 4,000 yuan (US$500).

(Xinhua News Agency January 26, 2006)