Millions of people took to the country, traveling to places from the most popular to the offbeat.
The 8-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday were the most robust travel season of recent times, with tourist trips and revenues surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
In China, 826 million visits were made during the holiday, an increase of 71.3 percent from last year and 4.1 percent from 2019.
The tourism industry's total revenue rose 129.5 percent year-on-year to 753.4 billion yuan, reflecting 1.5 percent growth from 2019, the ministry said.
Data from the transportation sector further confirms the travel rush.
A daily average of 57.28 million passengers were made during the eight-day holiday, up 57.1 percent from the National Day holiday last year.
On Sept. 29, the nation's railways experienced a record-breaking single-day peak of more than 20 million passengers.
Xu Bin, who works at China Railway Shenyang Group Co., Ltd. in northeast China's Liaoning Province, said that despite the introduction of 100 return train services and 540,000 seats during the holiday period, some popular routes were still in high demand.
Air trips averaged 2.14 million a day during the holiday period, up 195 percent from a year earlier.
The operations control center at Beijing Capital International Airport, Xie Yue, the senior manager of the operation center, said daily passenger flows over the first five days of the holiday doubled from last year. The airport played a role in boosting domestic flights, with the number of flights on the weekend surpassing the number of flights in 2019.
During the holiday, the city's capital, Shenyang, received a total of12.2 million domestic tourists, surpassed the city's permanent population. Some tourist attractions in the city were required to implement emergency crowd control measures, the city's govt said.
The return of crowds signals that the tourism industry is becoming the new normal, according to the research arm of China's major online travel agency Trip.com. The recovery of outbound tourism in China is predicted to boost the economies of destination nations and revive the global tourism industry.
On the first day of the 2023 golden week holiday, outbound travel orders surged 11 times from the same day last year and 54 percent from the May Day holiday this year. Thailand, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and the UK were among the top international destinations for tourists from China.
By the end of 2023, the World Travel & Tourism Council predicts that China's tourism industry will contribute 1.48 trillion dollars to the nation's economy, an increase of more than 150 percent from 2022.
WTTC President and CEO Julia Simpson, a spokeswoman, said in a press release.