Overseas investors owned more Chinese yuan-denominated bonds at the end of last month, as the country's bond market opened up wider to the world.

At the end of February, the total amount of yuan bonds owned by overseas institutions under the depository of the China Central Depository & Clearing Co. (CCDC) surged 36.36 percent year on year to 1.51 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars), the CCDC said on its website.

The amount was also slightly up by 0.37 percent from the end of last year, accounting for roughly 2.6 percent of the total value of bonds under the CCDC depository, the data showed.

The strong growth in overseas holdings of yuan bonds was in part boosted by the Bond Connect program, a market access scheme launched in July 2017 that allows overseas investors to invest in the Chinese mainland's interbank bond market using financial institutions of the mainland and Hong Kong.

To further open up the bond market, the country announced in November 2018 that overseas institutions investing in its bond market would be exempted from corporate income tax and value-added tax on their bond interest earnings for a period of three years.