The Chunyun of 2014 covers 40 days, and a total of 3.6 billion trips are expected to be made during the period. In this mass migration, what are the hottest departure points and destinations? Which routes are the busiest? In the past, we could not answer those questions precisely. However, along with the development of information technology, we are close to seeing the whole picture of Chunyun by applying big data.

Chunyun on the live map

On January 26, 2014, search engine giant Baidu launched "Baidu Migration", an online map tracking the movement of Chinese people migrating to other parts of the country for the spring Festival. This map uses location-based technology to track its 200 million registered users. The data is gathered from smart phone usage, and is updated hourly.

Click on Beijing, and we can find out that on January 26 from 11:00 to19:00, the top 3 destinations were Baoding, Tianjin and Dezhou. The highest numbers of incoming visitors were coming from Tianjin, Baoding, Chengdu and Shanghai. Through this new application, we know that Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong had the largest outflow of travelers, which confirms the common sense judgment that developed regions have the greatest external populations.