Taiwan receives record mainland visitor numbers in first half

Some 2.8 million people visited Taiwan from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macau in the first half of 2015, according to official data. The figure accounts for 55 percent of the nearly five million visitors to the island in the January-June period.
The mainland was the biggest contributor of tourists to Taiwan during the six-month period. Compared with the same period in 2014, there were 121,783 more mainlanders that made the trip across the Taiwan Strait.
Japanese and South Korean tourists ranked second and third, with about 750,000 and 330,000 visitors respectively.
According to Taiwanese authorities, 70.9 percent of travellers came to the island for sightseeing, 7.7 percent for business and four percent to visit family.
Last year, the annual number of visitors to Taiwan exceeded nine million for the first time. Taiwan is expecting ten million tourists this year.