Published : 2025-02-11
China's travel rush during the Spring Festival is said to be the "largest migration" in human history, but train tickets can be now easily purchased with just a few clicks on your phone.
This is all done on 12306, China's official railway ticketing system, which is the world's largest real-time ticketing system and sells over 1,000 train tickets per second.
Behind this system stands a key figure — Shan Xinghua, Chief Researcher at the China Academy of Railway Sciences Corporation, who is considered the "super brain".
Shan Xinghua｜Stepping out of the small village
Shan Xinghua (單杏花) was born in a remote mountain village in Wuyuan, Jiangxi Province. Her family has been farmers all their lives, but she excelled academically from a young age and was the first university student in her village.
In 1996, Shan ranked first and entered the East China Jiaotong University for her master's degree. At that time, the China Academy of Railway Sciences was developing the first generation ticketing system and recruited 28 teachers and students from across the country, known as the "28 Generals of Yuntai" (雲台二十八將).
Shan Xinghua was selected right after she began her studies, thus starting her connection with railways and the ticketing system.
A year later, the ticketing system 1.0 was launched for the first time at Jiangxi Jiujiang Station. Shan Xinghua was the youngest in the team, but under the guidance of her seniors, she took on important tasks of system installation and debugging.
"The pressure was immense... various complex data intertwined... but the moment the ticket library was created, I cheered from the bottom of my heart," she recalled in an interview.
After graduating with her master's degree, she naturally joined the China Academy of Railway Sciences. 28 years passed in the blink of an eye, and she became the only one from the original "28 Generals of Yuntai" who has remained steadfast to this day.
Shan Xinghua｜The world's "most difficult" algorithm
Before 2011, long queues at various train stations in China were still very common.
After that year's Spring Festival travel rush, the then Ministry of Railways decided to develop the first generation online ticketing system.
Read more: What has changed about China's Spring Festival travel rush in the years of Reform and Opening-up?
After a series of development, testing, and adjustments, the team worked overtime and completed the complex preparations in just three months.
On June 12, 2011, the 12306 system sold its first e-ticket of high-speed train, marking the commencement of online ticket sales for China's high-speed rails.
In 2012, the 12306 system faced the test of a sudden surge in visits for the first time during the Spring Festival travel rush. The explosive increase in ticketing demand during this period caused the website to nearly collapse, and concerns form passengers poured in.
In fact, the operation of the railway ticketing system is very complicated.
Taking the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway as an example, if a train stops at 24 stations, there are 276 possible combinations of departure and destination stations for a single ticket.
Assuming there are 1,000 seats in a train, this could result in thousands or even tens of thousands of tickets, and this doesn't even include the data volume from ticket bookings, cancellations, and alterations. Besides, this massive amount of data has to be synchronised with thousands of offline ticket counters across the country.
Therefore, it's not an exaggeration to call the algorithm running on this system the "world's most difficult algorithm".
Read more: Spring Festival travel rush witnesses China's economic take-off
"Just the inquiry of remaining tickets alone involves tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of complex calculations."
In the face of passengers' doubts about the system, Shan had no time to explain, but could only solve the problems as quickly as possible. She led the team to work continuously for 50 days and nights, optimising the system without any experience, "We were like flying and fixing the plane at the same time."
Today, 12306 issues over 1,000 tickets per second during peak times, with over 700 million registered users and an annual ticket sales volume exceeding 4 billion tickets, making it the world's largest real-time ticketing system.
Read more: What does the official railway ticketing website "12306" mean?
Shan Xinghua｜12306 now offers various services
To further enhance experience of users, the 12306 passenger ticketing system underwent reforms in 2017. It incorporated with facial recognition algorithms, which reduced the time to pass through gates by two-thirds.
Similar transformations were done six times by Shan Xinghua and her team. After thousands of function optimizations, 12306 has gradually realized a variety of features like standby ticketing, silent carriages, online meal ordering, and accessibility services.
Today, 12306 is not just a simple ticketing system, but it also offers various services such as food, clothing, housing, travel, shopping, and entertainment. Shan Xinghua also led the team to launch the "12306 Poverty Alleviation Mall," where fruits, vegetables, meat, tea, and snacks are sold online, helping farmers sell these agricultural products nationwide.
Although Shan Xinghua has been working for nearly 30 years, she "has new ideas every day, new actions every week, and new goals every month," making travel more convenient and comfortable for hundreds of millions of passengers.
