Chongqing district makes government canteen accessible to tourists, earns rave reviews

The longish May Day holiday (five days this year) has always been big for travel, given the balmy season, but this year there was also the serendipity of finding small-time but hotly buzzed destinations.

It seemed that conflicting factors were at work in the choice of destination: the herd instinct to be beholden to social media hype, and the sobriety to avoid the beaten track, and the crowd.

An unexpected tourist mecca this year was Rongchang District in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, which received 2.3 million tourists during the holiday, a growth of whopping 168 percent over the same period last year.

With local catering facilities overstretched by the sudden influx of tourists, the local government went out of its way to deliver the necessary services, even making the government canteen accessible to tourists, earning it rave reviews.

With the canteen being catapulted into a famed WeChat phenomenon, an average 7,000 tourists flocked there on an average day to savor local delicacies, particularly the much sought-after lu'e, pot-stewed goose, priced at 18 yuan (US$7.2) a dish.

Although legend traces the dish's history to the 17th century, when there were massive migrations of people from Guangdong, Hubei and Hunan, including the Hakkas, to sparsely populated Sichuan (due to ravages of war), its meteoric rise to stardom has been more recent.

About a month ago, a local influencer Lin Jiang offered the delicacy to IShowSpeed, who was smitten immediately. IShowSpeed, who was touring China at the time, is an American influencer with 37 million fans on YouTube.

It's a veritable test for the chefs, some of whom, after preparing and chopping 800 geese to slices from 6am to very late in the evening, had blisters form on their fingers. One chef quipped: "This is more than a canteen. It's like a battlefield!"

Governmental services go well beyond catering. A number of governmental departments in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei Province, have made their parking lots and restrooms freely available to outside vehicles and visitors.

Other measures to woo tourists include giving out coupons and reduced admission fees to scenic sights.

This time around, the local government and tourist authority seemed to have struck the right note, providing solid services in earnest, rather than pulling off showy stunts.

Last year some local tourist administrations were jeered by mainstream media for "overreaching themselves."

For instance, the Zhangjiajie forest park management in Hunan Province staged a dance featuring the long defunct zombie ritual.

In the northern Hebei Province, a local government released a promotional video with the tourist sights deliberately pixelated, with a punchline: "We learned that this is the correct way to start a promotional video. Did you see it all?"

In contrast, during the recent May Day holiday, government employees were engaged in providing services in earnest. For instance, in the Rongchang District canteen, some cadres were seen helping with kitchen work, packing food, or ladling out soup, earning plaudits from tourists.

These down-to-earth practices and word-of-mouth commendations are more effective adverts for local tourism, and would inevitably draw more tourists in the future.

Nor do these government departments pay court to tourists only.

The Rongchang District government canteen has decided to make its lunch available to residents regularly, on the first Saturday of each month, a tantalizing move.