New Airport Opened in Shangri-la

   With the opening of a new airport at the
Diqing Tibetan Autonomous  Prefecture May 6,
southwest China's Yunnan province has thus had air
services to all its hot tourist attractions.
      The air service network is expected to ease the
communications bottleneck that has held back the development of tourism and
economy as a whole in the province and may well cope with the anticipated tourism
boom during the six-month run of the China '99 International Horticultural Exposition.

      Yunnan is a province renowned for its picturesque scenery and ethnic customs
and conventions. Some 94 percent of the land in the province are mountainous.

      Yunnan has invested more than two billion yuan in airport construction over
the past decade. It has built five new airports in Xishuangbanna, Mangshi, Lijiang,
Dali and Diqing, and renovated four others. Now Yunnan has the largest number
of second- and first-class civil airports in the nation's province-level regions.

      The China '99 Kunming International Horticulture Exposition, which was launched
on April 30 and will last 184 days, is expected to attract more than ten million visitors,
with about a quarter of them expected to travel by air.
      Statistics from the Yunnan Airlines show that Yunnan has so far opened air routes
to 96 cities outside the province and foreign cities, with the number of daily flights
exceeding 100. The number of flights from Kunming to places of interest inside the
province has also increased to more than 330.