Chinese search engine Baidu has launched a visual map which shows the pattern of people travelling within China during the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Chinese officials expect a total of 3.6 billion trips to be made by people during the 40-day Lunar New Year travel period, the biggest national holiday in the country.

Baidu, often known as the "Google of China", analysed data on the system to establish the top destinations to where people are travelling to and from, and their most popular routes.

The details are represented visually in a heatmap by tracking location based data from smartphones using Baidu Maps and other location-based apps provided by the company.

The map updates automatically every hour.

Baidu Maps has more than 200 million users and it receives 3.5 billion location requests in a day.

NB:China image via Shutterstock.