Special Note to Travelers:

Here is a short story to emphasize the difficulty people have buying tickets during the two Golden Weeks of Chinese New Year and National Day. The other day a woman went to the Beijing train station at 5:00 a.m to buy tickets home for the holiday. When she arrived there was only one person in front of her so she thought her chances of securing a ticket were pretty good. At 9:00, just after ticket sales went live, the computer network crashed/froze because of the high volume and she was unable to buy a ticket.

Consider this: there are 2.5 inches of railway for every Chinese person. The point being, there is just not enough rail to handle this semiannual mass migration.

For more reasons not to travel during this time read these articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunyun
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-01/18/content_4066638.htm
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2007-10/27/content_6210744.htm
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2008-02/02/content_6437255.htm

Here are some more facts about Golden Week:

1. Golden Weeks were first introduced in 1999 to boost tourism and allow migrants to return home.
2. China’s petty crime rates peak in the days leading up to Golden Week.
3. The daily seat capacity of the railway system in China is 2.8 million people
4. The daily train passenger average during golden week is 3.6 million people.
5. During the most recent Golden week retail sales reached 60 billion USD.