When her best friend died from leukaemia last year, Ran Jing made a promise to herself; she would travel to Tibet as soon as she graduated from high school. Her classmate had been a Buddhist, and it had been her dream to see Lhasa.
A few months after her 18th birthday, Ran set off alone from her home in Henan province, taking buses and sharing cars, on a pilgrimage to the Tibetan capital in memory of her friend.
'I'm doing this for her,' she says, breaking her inbound trip in a youth hostel in Xinduqiao, a small town in Kandze (Ganzi in Chinese), an autonomous Tibetan prefecture in western Sichuan.
RAN WAS JUST ONE of tens of thousands of young Chinese tourists who visited Tibet this summer. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but the Tibet Tourism Bureau reports that 2.25 million tourists visited the Tibet Autonomous Region in the first half of the year, up almost 25 per cent year on year. The entire population of the region is just under three million. The bulk of these tourists were domestic; foreigners require a special permit to enter Tibet and were banned in March, June and July.
National Highway 318, which links Sichuan's provincial capital, Chengdu, with Lhasa, saw flocks of Han Chinese pedalling their way to Tibet, sometimes their bicycles appearing to outnumber vehicles on the road. These spiralling tourist statistics are also reflected in the success of local hostels.
In 2006, Sichuan native Yang Xiaohui opened his first guesthouse - called Denba, after the adopted Tibetan name Yang now goes by - and aimed it at the Chinese backpacker and long-distance cyclist. In fewer than five years, his business has grown from that first hostel, in Dardo (Kangding) in Kandze, to 13 budget guesthouses: two in Tibet, one in Yunnan and 10 in Sichuan.
The most obvious draw for the increasing number of young Chinese visitors is, of course, the region's natural beauty. Alpine grasslands, fresh air, snow-capped mountains and spiritual mystique hold a special attraction for the new urban rich who have grown up in crowded, polluted cities.