Chinese Billionaire Li Jinyuan Takes 6,400 Employees on Holiday to France

Tiens Group has treated more than half of its 12,000 employees to a four-day holiday in Paris and Nice.

The huge Chinese company booked up 140 hotels in Paris as part of the package, a French foreign ministry spokeswoman said on May 7.

The trip by the 6,400-strong group included a mass visit to the Louvre museum, Le Parisien reported.

The members of one of the biggest Chinese groups ever to come to Europe arranged themselves on the Promenade des Anglais in the southern resort town of Nice to spell out the phrase “Tiens’ dream is Nice in the Cote d’Azur”.

Guinness World Records inspectors duly declared that the visitors had created the longest human-made phrase visible from the sky. The mass trip to France, and the stunt in Nice, were organized to mark 20 years of the Tiens Group.

Tiens Group chairman Li Jinyuan, 57, met France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius on May 6.

He booked 4,760 rooms in 79 four-and five-star hotels in Cannes and Monaco. The tourists also required 146 buses to drive them around. Nice was estimated to be €20 million ($22 million) better off for the visit.

According to the Tiens website, Li Jinyuan founded the group in 1995 and has expanded it into an international conglomerate with businesses in biotechnology, health management, ecommerce, hotel and tourism, among others.

Li Jinyuan is listed on the Forbes 2011 list of the world’s billionaires.