A boy plays with a “Back Home for Spring Festival” sign in a car on train K4159 before its departure from Beijing yesterday. This marked the first passenger train to leave Beijing as China’s 40-day Spring Festival travel rush, the largest annual human migration on Earth, commenced. Shenzhen’s rail network was estimated to have sent out nearly 260,000 passengers yesterday. This is the first chunyun, or Spring Festival travel rush, since UNESCO inscribed Spring Festival on its intangible cultural heritage list in December. Nationally, 9 billion passenger trips are expected during the rush that lasts until Feb. 22, with both rail and air passenger trips set to hit record highs.

P3>  Xinhua