Chinese New Year: Why many will travel home for good

Every Chinese New Year as people board trains, planes, buses, cars and mopeds to head home for the warmth of the family reunion, they arrive battered and beleaguered, each with their own tale of travelling woe.

The 20-hour journeys with standing room only. The pickpockets. And just the sheer overwhelming numbers of people, thronging every platform, forming every queue.

So when the whole country seemingly becomes one large crowd it might seem unlikely that China would be shocked by pictures of a large crowd.
But then the Guangzhou Railway Station crowd was a particularly special one.

The snarl-up began on Monday with bad weather further north causing the cancellation or delay to some services out of Guangzhou.

As word spread of the increasingly large throng of waiting passengers, even more people began turning up extra early for their trains and the problem only intensified.

'Dumplings in a bowl'

At the peak, 100,000 people were crammed shoulder to shoulder on the giant square in front of the station, spilling out into side roads.

"We are like dumplings in a bowl," one man told me. He faced a three-hour wait to clear security and then, once finally aboard his train, an eight-hour journey home.

"I am very tired," another young woman said "but when I think about my mother and father at home I feel warm and I want to be with them sooner."

Despite the extraordinary scenes of congestion, this was as much a picture of railway efficiency and resilience, as chaos and delay.

Despite more than 1,000 extra police officers being drafted in for the crowds, there was little trouble for them to deal with.

I saw one passenger slugging a uniformed police officer with his bag, enraged that he had been stopped from climbing over a metal barrier, but for the most part,