Residents in another seven cities on the Chinese mainland will be able to apply for individual tours to Taiwan on Wednesday, August 28, reported Xinhua News Agency.

The seven newly-added cities are Shijiazhuang in Hebei province, Changchun in Jilin province, Hefei in Anhui province, Changsha in Hunan province, Nanning in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, Kunming in Yunnan province and Quanzhou in Fujian province.

Taiwan is now opening its individual tourism market to 26 mainland cities.

Since August 1, Taiwan has removed the restriction on the number of visits by qualified individual mainland tourists, who have either traveled to Taiwan at least twice in the past 12 months with good record or possess special visas from mainland authorities with the privilege of unlimited travel in Taiwan.

As of August 15, as many as 270,000 mainlanders have travelled to Taiwan individually this year, compared with 190,000 in all of 2012, sources from Taiwan's tourism bureau said.

Edited by Chen Zhilin and Michael Thai