More than one million foreign travelers visited South Korea last month, similar to the numbers seen before COVID-19.

According to the Korea Tourism Organization on Friday, one-point-12 million foreign nationals visited the country in January, representing 101-point-one percent of the figure for 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic started.

Numbers were especially high for tourists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao, as well as Africa and the Middle East. 

The organization found that Chinese visitors accounted for the largest proportion of the total, around 364-thousand people.

Japan came in second with about 174-thousand travelers, followed by Taiwan and the United States.