Anyone who drives in Beijing during the weeklong May Day holiday would be impressed by a paperback menu presented by smiling staff in the city's service stations.

The reason is that notes on the menu could remind people of days marking the 24 divisions of the solar year in the traditional Chinese calendar _ and in a way that brings them back to the farmland where Chinese people have been working for thousands of years.

"My son loves feeding chickens and picking up eggs in the countryside, " said Cao Huiming, a senior manager of a Beijing-based company and father of a ten-year-old boy, "He's also fond of the food here," he added.

More attractive for the teenage boy is to water chestnuts, which could help him "establish some spiritual ties with the ancient Chinese farming culture in this dot com age", said his father.

"We have more and more visitors from the cities in recent years,"said Li Gensheng, a farmer in Jinpan Village of central China's Jiangxi Province, "Tourism has made our life better," added the stout man.

The vogue is sweeping across the nation, from Beijing to Yunnan, and Zhejiang to Tibet.

Sources with the National Holiday Office show that scenery sites scattered in rural areas receive 300 million tourists every year, collecting a revenue of 40 billion yuan (5.2 billion U.S. dollars).

"People's favor in traveling across the countryside shows their pursuit of harmony between human and nature," said Shao Qiwei, director of China's National Tourism Administration.

A tour to farmland links ancient China with the industrializing economic powerhouse in Asia.

"Tourists from cities have offered us job opportunities and tourism revenue, and above all they have brought information and a modernized way of life." said Gao Rongkuan, a village cadre in the suburb of Beijing.

Source: Xinhua