Beijing, January 15, 2008 ¨C Foreigners visiting Beijing are in unchartered waters. They have to rely on local guides to tour them, and help them shop around. That was before a team of Beijingers came to the rescue with www.shopping-in-beijing.com, a new information portal featuring descriptions of over 500 shops and 2,500 photos of the capital of China.
Venturing far from one¡¯s hotel into Beijing is not simple. Few Chinese people speak English, and the signage is of little help. Even Googlemaps has not fully mapped out the city. Yet many interesting shopping and sightseeing opportunities are found away from westernized venues like WangFuJing Street, the Silk Market, and other large shopping centers.
The team of Beijingers who built Shopping-in-Beijing.com did not discard the latter though. ¡°There are many shops worth a visit in WangFuJing and Xidan,¡± says Jason, a staff writer, ¡°but tourists should also know about those small shops where Beijingers actually go shopping.¡±
According to Phil Chavanne, architect of the project, ¡°Though we likely have covered only a third of the interesting venues so far, there is enough first-hand material in our guide that you would have to shop non-stop for 50 days before you exhaust its resources.¡±
Each of the shops featured in Shopping-in-Beijing.com has its photo and a full description in English, its address both in English and Chinese, a phone number, the hotels situated nearby, and the best way to get there. The shop will soon be pinpointed precisely on a map. Visitors can also familiarize themselves with Beijing through a unique collection of over 2,500 photos of street scenes and points of interest.
The editing team of Shopping-in-Beijing.com ambitions to ¡°have featured 1,000 shops by the end of 2008, and doubled the number of photos offered to visitors to 5,000¡±, stated Phil Chavanne.
For more information, please contact:
Phil Chavanne or Mark Li
Tel: 86-010-85865933
E-mail: press [at] shopping-in-beijing [dot] com |
