A splash of colors: (L) Kremlin and (R) the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed or St. Basil's Cathedral sit at the Red Square in Moscow, Russia. (Photo : Getty Images)
How colorful can traveling be?
More and more Chinese tourists travel to Russia and the U.K., strengthening the emergence of a new kind of niche in the business of travel: red tourism.
There were almost 410,000 Chinese who toured Russia in 2014, according to The Japan Times.
In Russia, Chinese travelers normally list Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ulyanovsk and Kazan in their itineraries.
“If St. Petersburg is Russia’s ‘window on Europe,’ Moscow is Russia’s heart,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The capital city of Moscow offers the following UNESCO World Heritage sites: the Kremlin (fortress) and Red Square (an open square), the Church of the Ascension, the city of Novgorod, the Novodevichy Convent (a 15th-century cloister) and the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius (home to monks).
Named Saint Petersburg in 1703, renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924 and back to Saint Petersburg in 1991, Russia’s second biggest city is another UNESCO World Heritage site.
Viktoria Borgacheva, the head of the association of Chinese interpreters and guides in St. Petersburg, said that their workload already received a “30 percent increase” starting in 2013, according to The Japan Times.
The historic city accommodated 26,000 Chinese tourists in 2014.
The region of Ulyanovsk serves as the birthplace of revolutionist Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924).
In Kazan, Lenin and prominent author Leo Tolstoy (1828- 1910), known for the classics “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” received their education at the Kazan State University, founded in 1804.
Lenin founded the Russian Communist Party and served as the first prime minister of the Soviet state.
It is estimated that the expenditure of Chinese tourists in Russia in 2014 amounted to $1 billion, reported Sputnik News.
In the U.K., Chinese tourists would likely lay flowers at the grave of sociologist and economist Karl Marx (1818-1883) in Highgate Cemetery in North London, England.
Marx’s writings on economy and politics paved way for the belief known as Marxism.
In the local scene, according to the country’s National Red Tourism Coordination Executive Team, China has been financing red tourism-related projects worth more than 9 billion yuan for the past years, reported the Global Times.
For this year, it can be anticipated that more travel packages to Russia will be sold by local travel agencies.
The largest country in the planet, Russia, will certainly have enough space for the world’s most populous country, China.
