In 1974, when Alan Lew travelled from the US to Hong Kong for the first time, China was a no-go zone and he was largely in the dark over what lay north of Hong Kong's border. Had a Temple Street fortune-teller predicted that, more than three decades later, China would be close to nabbing the title of the world's number one tourist destination, and that he would be co-chairing a Guangzhou conference on heritage tourism with Zhongshan University's tourism planning centre, he would scarcely have believed it.
Dr Lew, the American-born son of a Chinese father and a German mother, is a professor in the department of geography, planning and recreation at Northern Arizona University in the US. His speciality is tourism and he's an expert on the industry's development in China.
Dr Lew has become a leading voice among an international field of academic experts conducting research into the three principal themes of the July conference that will focus on the links between heritage and tourism.
'There's physical heritage, which translates primarily as architecture; cultural heritage, which broadly refers to traditional dress, dance, performances and so forth; and natural heritage, which is the physical environment,' he said of the forum's key topics.
While heritage tourism offers inherent and practical benefit to the nation and its huge domestic travel market, as well as the big and expanding Asian market, Dr Lew says it has the greatest potential for drawing vast numbers of visitors from North America, Europe and Australia. 'China is now the third largest tourist destination in the world after Spain and France. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation [UNWTO] predicts China will surpass Spain to become the most visited country in the world by 2020,' said Dr Lew.
Tim Oakes, another US expert watching the China tourism juggernaut, said: 'I think it will happen much sooner that that. The director of Asian studies in the department of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has been researching China's tourism development since 1991.