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The Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) welcomes 5.74 million visitors from China's mainland last year, which has become Macao's number-one source of visitor arrivals, ahead of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Macao's annual number of mainland Chinese visitor arrivals has risen 3.5 times in the past four years since Macao's return to itsmotherland in 1999, when they totalled 1.64 million, according to the latest statistics from the Macao Tourism Office.

Joao Costa Antunes, director of the office said that Macao's aim is not just to increase the number of visitors from the mainland but also to extend their stay in Macao, which is currently averaged to just one night.

Under its work plan, the Macao Tourism Office will carry out a series of tourism-promotion activities targeting at mainland tourists, which will also include an advertising campaign on newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations in the mainland.

The annual increase in the number of mainland visitors to Macaorose a momentum 35.4 percent last year as against 2002, as a result of the central government's relaxed exit restrictions that had previously limited individual travels to Hong Kong and Macao. The program is officially known as facilitated individual travel (FIT), which has been implemented in 14 cities in south China's Guangdong Province, Beijing and Shanghai.