(Yicai) March 19 -- The number of travelers passing through the Shenzhen-Hong Kong land border has hit several record highs since the end of the Chinese New Year holiday.

Some 92,000 people passed Liantang port’s border control point in Shenzhen on March 17, three times its designed flow capacity, according to monitoring data. The daily passenger flow at the border control point set four new records this month.

Luohu port, another border checkpoint in Shenzhen, recorded 210,000 passengers on March 17, over 83 percent of which were Hong Kong residents, according to data from the Hong Kong Immigration Department.

The land border between Shenzhen and Hong Kong resumed operation in phases on Jan. 8 last year, after China eased its Covid-19 pandemic prevention and control measures. The passenger flows between the two cities climbed quickly, with an especially large rise in Hong Kong travelers to the Chinese mainland.

The main consumption scenarios of Hong Kong residents traveling to Shenzhen are dining, leisure entertainment, sightseeing, visiting doctors, parenting, and automotive repair. Hong Kong residents prefer diversified consumption and leisure scenarios with higher price-quality ratios in the Chinese mainland, Yicai learned from travelers at Liantang port.

Some 427 brands opened their first stores in Shenzhen last year, of which 74 were the first ones they opened in the whole country. The new outlets of Sam’s Club and Costco became two of Shenzhen’s main attractions for Hong Kong residents.

During the eight-day Chinese New Year holiday in February, a record 5.4 million travelers passed through the Shenzhen-Hong Kong land border, with the average daily figure soaring over 11-fold from a year earlier, according to the official WeChat account of the Shenzhen Port Office.

Editor: Futura Costaglione