The Jinggangshan Airport in east China's Jiangxi Province reopened on Sunday afternoon with a group of passengers flying in from Beijing, announced an airport manager.

Located at the foot of Jinggang Mountain in Taihe County, the airport opened last May and closed five months later to lengthen its runways.

The reopening of the airport is of great importance to the development of local tourism because it brings Jinggangshan closer to the rest of the country.

Now the travel time from Beijing to Jinggangshan is just two hours and 15 minutes, said Gao Lijun, vice general manager of the airport.

A weekly flight from Beijing leaves at 5:10 p.m. every Sunday and arrives at Jinggangshan at 7:50 p.m. The same plane will leave the east China city for Beijing at 8:40 p.m. the same day.

The airport will soon launch a flight linking Jinggangshan to Guangzhou, in south China's Guangdong Province, said Gao on Sunday.

Passenger planes will leave Guangzhou at 7:00 p.m. and arrive at Jinggangshan one hour later on each Monday and Saturday. The planes are scheduled to head back to Guangzhou at around 8:50 p.m.

Gao did not say when the Jinggangshan-Guangzhou route would open but said more routes linking Jinggangshan with other major Chinese cities had been planned. As the demand increased more routes will open.

Covering an area of 660.87 square kilometers, the Jinggang Mountains is known as the cradle of the Chinese revolution, where Chairman Mao Zedong and his comrades established the first rural base for the revolution led by the Communist Party of China.

Statistics from the local tourism bureau show that visitors from home and abroad increased at 20 percent year-on-year. "Red travel" has boomed in recent years in the Jinggang Mountains, where there are many sites featuring the history of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (1928-1937).

The sites include a mint of the Red Army, the Jinggang Mountain Revolution Museum, a Red Army Village, which occupies an area of 10,000 square meters, and the Jinggang Mountain Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery.

(Xinhua News Agency May 23, 2005)