Mohamed Elbadri, ambassador of Egypt to China, delivers a speech at a ceremony in Beijing on Friday celebrating EgyptAir's 16th year of operations in China. Photo: Courtesy of Egypt Embassy in China

To commemorate its 16th year of operations in the Chinese mainland, Egypt's flag carrier airline EgyptAir and the Egypt Embassy in Beijing held a ceremony at the embassy on Friday. The ceremony also celebrated the recent opening of a new direct route from Hangzhou, the capital of East China's Zhejiang Province, to Egyptian capital city, Cairo. 

This new route, which flies twice a week, brings the total number of EgyptAir direct flights between the Chinese mainland and Egypt to three and is a welcoming addition to the previous daily Guangzhou-Cairo route and the Beijing-Cairo route that operates three times a week.

Egyptian Ambassador to China Mohamed Elbadri told the Global Times that around 450,000 Chinese visited Egypt in 2018, a majority of whom were tourists. Compared to the 150 million international trips made by Chinese that year, this figure is still small, but the embassy is determined to make efforts to increase Chinese travel to the country. The embassy is planning to organize more promotional and outreach campaigns such as holding exhibitions of Egyptian relics in China to attract more Chinese tourists to visit Egypt.

While Elbadri has only been the ambassador of Egypt to China for about seven weeks by now, he has already started traveling the country to get to know it better. In recent weeks, Elbadri traveled to Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, where he went to see China's distinguished Terracotta Warriors. 

"Being the sons and daughters of the two oldest civilizations in the world," the ambassador has faith that admiration of each country's long history and culture will inspire more frequent travels between the two.

Kamal Refaat, manager of EgyptAir's Beijing Branch, told the Global Times that the average capacity of flights from Hangzhou to Cairo is nearly 80 percent, well within expectations for such a great commercial port in China.