Baidu, China's No. 1 search engine, will offer tourism information on Korea in Chinese, as part of Seoul's efforts to attract more travelers from the region's largest tourism market, the state-run tourism agency here said Wednesday.

The Korea Tourism Organization signed an agreement with The Map Korea, the Korean search agent for Baidu, to offer about 47,000 items of Korean tourism information in Chinese.

"We will continue to expand tourism information in foreign languages to deal with a rising number of individual tourists," Choi Jong-hak, a senior KTO official, said.

Baidu is China's largest search engine with 620 million web users in 2015.

The number of Chinese tourists visiting Korea had sharply risen since 2010, but fell 2.3 percent on-year to 5.98 million in 2015, hurt by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak.

Korea aims to attract 8 million Chinese tourists this year by offering various specialized tour packages and adopting eased visa regulations. (Yonhap)