A tour guide greets a group of visitors from South Korea with a signboard in Korean in Chengdu on July 12, 2008. [Photo: Chengdu Business Daily]

More than 300 tourists from 21 Chinese cities arrived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province on Saturday.

This is the largest tourist group to visit the city after the 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit southwest China's Sichuan Province on May 12, the Chengdu Business Daily reported on Sunday.

According to an agreement between the municipal government of Chengdu and China Comfort Travel Agency, the latter will call on its 108 agencies nationwide to promote 10 tourist routes around Chengdu. The travel agency also promised to bring at least 10,000 tourists from other provinces to visit Chengdu during July and August.

Because the city is still recovering, visitors can receive tourist package discounts ranging from hundreds of yuan to more than 1,000 yuan, the report said.

In the past 10 days, Comfort's agencies in Beijing, Tianjin, Hubei Province and Shanxi Province have received more than 100 calls a day, requesting travel information for Chengdu.

Wang Qiang, a tourist from Beijing, told reporters that he enjoyed Chengdu's delicious cuisine, the report said. Although he had been to the city many times, he was still looking forward to enjoying more typical snack foods, he said.

On the same day, Chengdu greeted a tourist party from South Korea. The group took a chartered flight from Seoul. This was the first foreign tourist group to fly to the post-quake Sichuan Province, the report said.

The group, composed of delegates from several Korean travel agencies, media workers and regular tourists, will stay in Sichuan for six days to gather tourism information and designate new routes for Korean visitors.

By the end of July, new travel routes in Sichuan Province will be promoted in South Korea, the report said. It also said another tourist group from South Korea would arrive in Chengdu on July 26.