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Performers from the Happy Valley theme park welcome visitors during the holidays. More than 2.98 million people visited the city's tourist attractions during the seven-day break.

About 8.69 million people entered the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone during the National Day holidays.

"This number represents a drop of 3.79 percent compared with the same period last year," said holiday tourism management office spokesperson, Ma.

"But we have still felt a strongly festive Shenzhen in the past few days," said Wen Jianguo, a Shenzhen resident. Wen said that from what he saw throughout the city he did not feel the holiday tourism fever had dimished.

Various parks throughout the city have been bustling with visitors from overseas and throughout the country. Holiday tourism management office figures indicated that there were a total of 2.98 million visits to the city's tourist attractions during the holidays, an increase of 4.8 percent.

"We have been just as busy as in the past holidays," said a man surnamed Mo who works with the China Folk Culture Villages.

The Fifth China International Landscape and Flora Expo park opened only a few days before the holidays began and has become one of the most popular attractions in the city. During the past seven days, it was visited by a total of 182,900 people.

"The expo park has attracted the most people in the golden week among the city's theme parks," said Ma.

Many families and migrant workers swarmed to various free public parks such as Bijiashan Hill and Lotus Hill.

"I think the public parks are as beautiful as the theme parks that charge for admission," said Sun Xiaoqiang, a migrant worker from Jiangxi, who said that with a low salary he and his fellow workers had visited public parks during several weeklong holidays.

Shopping or window shopping were a favorite pastime for some holidaymakers. Dongmen pedestrian street, one of the city's most popular shopping centers, had more than 3 million visitors in the first four days of the golden week.

Against a backdrop of falling numbers of holidaymakers, Shenzhen has benefited from the national policy of allowing individual tours to Hong Kong from several municipalities and provinces.

"I arrived in Shenzhen the day before yesterday. I will go to Hong Kong after seeing Shenzhen," said a man surnamed Wang from Fujian Province. Wang was only one of the nearly 50,000 people who traveled through Shenzhen to Hong Kong each day during the holidays.

Huang Junsheng, an official with the Shenzhen exit and entry frontier inspection authorities, said most of the individual Hong Kong-bound travelers from inland had chosen to go through Shenzhen. Most would spend at least one day touring Shenzhen before leaving for Hong Kong.

"No doubt Shenzhen is the most beautiful city in China in terms of greenery and cleanness," said a Mr. Su, who had returned to Shenzhen from visiting Hunan.

His view was echoed by visitors from outside Shenzhen.

"Shenzhen is better than any other Chinese cities I've been to in many aspects. It's clean and orderly," said a Ms Cui from Qingdao, a coastal city in eastern China.

Shenzhen has been called "Western" by many Westerners. Some foreigners who work in Shenzhen have used the holidays travel to other parts of the country to see "the real China."

Edmond Smith, an American who has been teaching English in Shenzhen for more than a year, traveled to several northern China cities including Taiyuan and Shijiazhuang.

"Those cities are a far cry from Shenzhen in modernity. But I like them, because I saw farmers toiling and people in traditional clothes. The food sometimes might taste strange, but I think it was authentic ethnic food," he said.

Editor: Donald