Nepal Promised China 500,000 Tourists in a Year. It Got 95,480 — Now a Delegation From Sichuan Has Landed to Try Again
China's 2025 pledge to flood Nepal with half a million visitors delivered barely a fifth of that number. Days ago, a five-person tourism delegation from Sichuan sat down with Nepal Tourism Board to plan the next attempt.
Key facts
- China named 2025 'Visit Nepal Year in China' and informally pledged 500,000 Chinese visitors.
- Nepal recorded just 95,480 Chinese arrivals in 2025 — about 19% of that target.
- Arrivals actually fell 6.3% year-on-year, down from 101,874 in 2024.
- A five-member delegation from China's Sichuan province met Nepal Tourism Board on 23 July 2026 to plan the next push.
Eighteen months ago, China did something it had never done for another country: it declared 2025 'Visit Nepal Year in China,' a state-level tourism promotion normally reserved for domestic destinations. Behind the announcement, officials on both sides spoke of half a million Chinese visitors landing in Kathmandu and Pokhara over the year — a number that would have made China Nepal's second-largest source market almost overnight.
It did not happen. Nepal Tourism Board figures show 95,480 Chinese arrivals in 2025 — barely a fifth of the pledge, and a 6.3% decline on the year before, according to The Kathmandu Post's January 2026 review of the campaign. A tourism board director quoted in that report was blunt about why: the marketing push was poorly planned, tour operators reported 'simply no demand for Nepal,' and September's political unrest and rising airfares didn't help.
Chinese arrivals to Nepal have never fully recovered from the pandemic collapse and, before that, from the 2015 earthquakes and a diplomatic blockade. The high-water mark remains 169,543 in 2019, the year after Xi Jinping's state visit to Kathmandu — a level Nepal has not come close to since, despite three separate promotional pushes.
A new delegation, a narrower pitch
On 23 July 2026, a five-member delegation led by Chen Guanghao, director general of the Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, sat down with Nepal Tourism Board officials in Kathmandu for a three-day visit. Rather than chase another headline arrivals number, the pitch this time was narrower: cultural, adventure and Buddhist tourism links between Sichuan and Nepal, plus organised familiarisation trips for Chinese celebrities, media personalities and bloggers — the kind of organic social content a government marketing budget alone can't buy.
A Nepal Tourism Board official pointed to Sichuan's geographic closeness to Nepal as the practical opening. Sichuan already runs tourism trade links with Nepal through Chengdu, including past B2B sessions between Sichuan travel agents and Pokhara hoteliers.
What this means for trekkers
If you're worried about crowded trails, this isn't really about you. Chinese group tourism to Nepal skews heavily toward short cultural and pilgrimage circuits — Kathmandu Durbar Square, Pokhara, Lumbini and Buddhist heritage sites like Boudhanath Stupa — not multi-week teahouse trekking. Even at its 2019 peak, Chinese arrivals never meaningfully changed the character of the Everest or Annapurna trails, which are dominated by independent Western trekkers and organised groups from India, the US, the UK and Europe. What a healthier China market does mean for every trekker: more flight capacity, more hotel investment in Kathmandu and Pokhara, and a more resilient tourism economy overall — useful context alongside the numbers we broke down for India, Nepal's dominant market, earlier this year.
For now, the practical story is a modest one: a smaller, more targeted delegation trying to succeed where a headline pledge fell short. Whether familiarisation trips for bloggers move the needle more than a national marketing campaign did will show up in next year's Nepal Tourism Board arrival figures.
Source: The Kathmandu Post; delegation details via KathmanduPati and Nepal Tourism Board.
Cover photo: Bijay Chaurasia via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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