This amazing heat map shows the world’s largest human movement as Chinese New Year begins

Chinese New Year starts on Wednesday, but many people are already hitting the road to return to their hometowns. Each year it results in the world’s largest human migration. China’s top search engine is tracking many of those journeys and has created an amazing, real-time heat map showing the exodus from the major cities. This is the scene right now:

The national holiday – called Spring Festival – officially lasts seven days, but the vast migration occurs over weeks as migrant laborers, factory workers, and students head home first, followed later by office workers. The trip is called chun yun in Chinese, which literally means “spring movement”. Not everyone voyages to their hometown during Chinese New Year, but the migration is still incredible in scale; China’s Ministry of Transport expects people to undertake 2.8 billion trips during this year’s festivities.

Baidu created the Chinese New Year travel heat map for the first time last year. This year it once again uses location-based data from Baidu’s apps, such as Baidu Maps, to highlight the swarm of journeys taking place.

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At the time of writing, the heat map shows that most of the movement is of people leaving Shanghai and Shenzhen. Beijing, meanwhile, is seeing the greatest activity when you factor in both incoming and outgoing travelers.

Clicking on Shanghai in the list, the interactive map changes to show (pictured below) orange lines tracking people flowing into Shanghai, while the yellow lines follow the people leaving the city: