China

Overview

China is too big to feel like one country. Breakfast in Beijing is millet porridge and pickled vegetables; lunch a thousand kilometres south in Guangzhou is dim sum trolleys and chrysanthemum tea; dinner in Chengdu is mouth-numbing peppercorn and chillies that leave your lips tingling for an hour. The written characters are the same. Almost nothing else is.

The headlines you already know: the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Terracotta Army, pandas in bamboo. They are real, they are mostly worth the queue, and they cover roughly two percent of what is here. The rest is a continent of mountains, deserts, river gorges, karst pinnacles, rice terraces and twenty-million-strong cities you have never heard of.

Three things shape almost every trip. First, the practical wall: payments, navigation and most Western apps run on a different internet, so you arrive with a VPN installed and money loaded into Alipay or WeChat Pay before you land. Second, the language: outside the international hotel layer of Shanghai and Hong Kong, English is rare and Mandarin is the only key that fits. Third, the scale: the high-speed rail network passed 45,000 km of track in 2023, the largest in the world, and you will spend a lot of time on it.

Two parts of the country run on their own rules. Hong Kong and Macao are Special Administrative Regions, with separate currencies (HKD and MOP), separate visa regimes, and separate everything from the news on TV to the side of the road the buses drive on. Crossing between the mainland and either of them is an international border with passport stamps. Plan as if for two countries, not one.

Regions

Beijing

Beijing is the political capital, the imperial capital of the Yuan, Ming and Qing, and the place every Chinese itinerary ends up touching. The Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven are inside the old city; the Great Wall is an hour or two north on day trips out of Mutianyu, Jinshanling or Simatai. The flat grid of hutong alleys around the Drum Tower is what survives of the older Beijing, and the food is northern and wheat-based: Peking duck roasted over fruitwood, lamb hotpot, hand-pulled noodles, jianbing on the corner.

Shaanxi

Shaanxi is where the Chinese state began. The Qin king Ying Zheng unified China from here in 221 BC and was buried east of Xi’an under the mound that produced the Terracotta Army. Successive dynasties (Qin, Han, Sui, Tang) ran the country from Chang’an, the Tang-era name for Xi’an, then the largest city on earth and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. The intact Ming city walls are still 14 km of bikeable rampart, and the Muslim Quarter inside is the legacy of Sogdian and Persian merchants who came down the trade routes a thousand years ago.

Sichuan

Sichuan is fertile basin country ringed by mountains, with Chengdu at the centre and Tibetan Kham on the western edge. It is panda country (the breeding centre at Chengdu is the most accessible reason to come), it is teahouse country (Chengdu’s Renmin Park is the textbook), and above all it is chilli country. The mouth-numbing mala effect of Sichuan peppercorn is genuinely unlike anything in Western cuisine. West of the basin the road climbs onto the Tibetan plateau through Kangding and Litang, with monasteries, grasslands and 5,000 m passes.

Chongqing

Chongqing was carved out of Sichuan in 1997 as China’s fourth direct-controlled municipality, the same tier as Beijing and Shanghai. The city itself sits on a peninsula where the Jialing meets the Yangzi, climbing thirty-storey apartment blocks up cliffs that flooded shipping pilots used to dread. Two reasons to come: hotpot (more aggressive and oilier than its Sichuan parent, eaten in steam-bath summer at outdoor tables), and the Yangzi cruise downstream through the Three Gorges. The Dazu Rock Carvings, a UNESCO site of more than 50,000 statues from the 9th to 13th centuries, are a half-day west of the city.

Guangxi

Guangxi is the karst landscape on every China postcard: limestone pinnacles rising out of paddy fields and the Li River, around Guilin and Yangshuo. It is also the autonomous region of the Zhuang, China’s largest ethnic minority at 17 million people, and home to Dong, Miao and Yao communities whose villages, festivals and wooden drum towers anchor the north of the region. South Guangxi runs to the Vietnamese border, where Detian Falls straddles the line between the two countries.

Guangdong

Guangdong is the Cantonese-speaking south, the export engine of the modern Chinese economy and the historical departure point for most of the Chinese diaspora. Guangzhou is the old foreign-trade port; Shenzhen, across the bay from Hong Kong, was a fishing village in 1980 and is now a city of nearly eighteen million. Guangdong invented dim sum and Cantonese opera; it also built the Kaiping watchtowers, an UNESCO-listed cluster of fortified family homes erected by returning overseas migrants in the early 20th century.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region, technically part of China and practically a different country. Cantonese is the working language, English is everywhere on signage, the currency is the Hong Kong dollar (HKD), and visas are separate: most Western passports get 90 days visa-free into Hong Kong but need a mainland Chinese visa to cross the border. The standard view (Victoria Harbour from the Star Ferry, the city from Victoria Peak) is the standard view for a reason. The other 70% of Hong Kong’s territory is country park: hills, beaches, walled Hakka villages, and 234 islands.

Macao

Macao is the other SAR, just 32.9 km² of Portuguese-Chinese baroque on the western side of the Pearl River estuary. Portugal ran it from 1557 to 1999, and the historic centre, listed by UNESCO in 2005, is still cobbled lanes, baroque churches and the Ruins of St Paul’s. The other reason Macao exists today is gambling: it overtook Las Vegas in casino revenue in 2006 and has not looked back. Currency is the pataca (MOP), Cantonese the working language, Portuguese mostly ornamental on street signs.

Geography & landscape

China’s territory tilts west to east in three giant steps. The first step is the Tibetan plateau in the southwest, averaging over 4,000 m, holding the headwaters of the Yellow, Yangzi, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers, and topping out at the Chinese-Nepali border on the north face of Mount Everest (8,849 m). The second step is the high basins and mountains of the centre and west: the Tarim Basin, the Gobi, the Loess Plateau of Shaanxi, the Sichuan basin and the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau, all between roughly 1,000 and 2,500 m. The third step is the lower-lying east, where most of the population, agriculture and cities sit.

Two rivers do most of the heavy lifting. The Yellow River (Huang He) runs 5,464 km through the Loess Plateau and the North China Plain, carrying the silt that gives it its name and historically flooding catastrophically; it dumps into the Bohai Sea north of Shandong. The Yangzi (Chang Jiang) is longer at 6,300 km, the third-longest river on earth, and drains a basin of 1.8 million km² that includes Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai. The Three Gorges between Chongqing and Yichang are the river’s signature stretch; the dam completed in 2006 raised the water level around 100 m and ended commercial junks navigating by sail.

The mountains worth a name include the Himalayas on the southwestern frontier; the Kunlun and Tian Shan in the northwest; the Qinling, which divides north and south China both climatically and culturally; the Hengduan ranges of western Sichuan, where the rivers run parallel north-to-south through 4,000-m gorges; and the Wuyi, Huangshan and Wudang of the east, all heavily climbed pilgrimage peaks. The southern karst belt across Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan is one of the largest tropical karst landscapes in the world, with around 620,000 km² of limestone country, classic conical pinnacles, and one of the densest concentrations of caves on earth.

The coastline runs about 14,500 km from the Korean border to the Vietnamese border, with the major estuaries at the Yellow River, Yangzi, Pearl River and Min, and the only large offshore island under PRC administration being Hainan in the far south.

Climate

China spans more than 50 degrees of latitude, so a single weather summary is useless. Three rough zones cover most travel: the cool-temperate north (Beijing, Xi’an, the Great Wall), the humid subtropical centre and south (Shanghai, Sichuan, Chongqing, the Yangzi basin), and the proper subtropics of Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macao.

Northern winters are dry and cold: Beijing averages around -3°C in January with biting wind, frequent blue-sky days and almost no rain. Summers in the north are hot and stormy, around 30–32°C in July with afternoon thunderstorms. Spring is short and dust-prone; autumn (mid-September to October) is the cleanest, clearest, most pleasant window for almost everywhere north of the Yangzi.

The Yangzi basin and inland southwest (Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan) sit under cloud most of the winter (5–10°C, rarely freezing, rarely sunny) and turn into a steam bath from June to August: Chongqing routinely passes 38°C, the Yangzi corridor is one of the most reliably oppressive places to be in late July, and high humidity makes everything feel hotter than the thermometer claims.

The deep south is subtropical and runs on a typhoon calendar. Hong Kong, Macao and the Pearl River delta sit at around 15–18°C in January (mild, occasionally damp), 28–30°C from May to September with humidity hovering at 80%. Typhoon season runs roughly July to October; a Hong Kong T8 signal closes the city for the day and ferries to Macao stop running. Air pollution is broadly worst in the cold months in the north (when coal heating ramps up) and least bad after rain anywhere.

Pack for the place, not the country. Beijing in February needs a proper down coat; Hong Kong in February needs a light jacket. There is no single bag for an itinerary that crosses both.

Food & drink

Han Chinese cooking is traditionally split into eight regional schools (ba da caixi), most of them named for their core province. Some you have eaten without realising; some take a trip to find.

Sichuan (Chuan) is the chilli school, but the trademark sensation is mala, the numbing-and-spicy effect of Sichuan peppercorn (hua jiao) added to the heat. Standard dishes anyone can recognise: mapo tofu, kung pao chicken, dan dan noodles, twice-cooked pork. The hotpot version, where you cook your own ingredients in a divided pot of red broth and milder white, is a Sichuan and Chongqing export now eaten everywhere in China.

Cantonese (Yue) is the southern school you already know from Chinatowns abroad. The philosophy is freshness over seasoning, the techniques are steaming, stir-frying and roasting, and the headline meal is yum cha: dim sum with tea, eaten mid-morning, in Guangdong and Hong Kong. Char siu pork, salt-baked chicken, steamed fish, congee and roast goose are all home-ground.

Shandong (Lu) is the oldest of the eight, the imperial cuisine of the late Ming and Qing courts, and the parent style behind northern Chinese cooking generally. Sea cucumber, braised abalone, sweet-and-sour Yellow River carp; on the everyday end, hand-pulled noodles, dumplings and steamed buns.

Jiangsu (Su) comes from the canal-and-rice country around Suzhou, Yangzhou and Nanjing. Dishes lean sweet, knife work is precise to the point of theatrical (Wensi tofu cut into hair-thin threads), and braised river fish, drunken crab, lion’s-head meatballs and Yangzhou fried rice are the signatures.

Zhejiang (Zhe) centres on Hangzhou, the southern Song capital, and Ningbo. West Lake fish in vinegar sauce, beggar’s chicken baked in clay, and dongpo pork (named after the Song-era poet Su Dongpo) are textbook. It shares Jiangsu’s lightness with a slightly sourer edge.

Fujian (Min) is sea-based, light and broth-heavy, with fermented red rice wine, peanuts and local seafood as recurring notes. The famously baroque dish “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall” is a Fujianese banquet stew of abalone, sea cucumber, scallop, ham and herbs slow-cooked in shaoxing wine.

Hunan (Xiang) is the other Chinese chilli school, sharper and more straightforwardly hot than Sichuan, without the mala numbness. Chairman Mao’s hometown style: smoked, cured and stir-fried pork, dried chillies by the handful, fermented black beans, and the everyday Hunan staple of red-braised pork.

Anhui (Hui) is the inland mountain school, heavy on wild herbs, bamboo shoots, mushrooms and slow-braised game. Less famous abroad, more interesting on the ground.

The two table conventions worth knowing in advance: meals are shared, with dishes placed centrally and everyone reaching in with chopsticks; and tea is poured for others before yourself, with two fingers tapped on the table as silent thanks when someone refills your cup. Rice usually arrives towards the end of a proper meal, not at the start. Vegetarianism is genuinely difficult outside Buddhist temple restaurants; “vegetable” dishes are routinely cooked in chicken stock or with pork fat. Tap water is not drinkable; bottled or boiled is universal.

Culture & society

Three philosophical traditions ran the Chinese imagination for two thousand years. Confucianism is the social blueprint: hierarchy, ritual, family duty, deference to age and education, the gentleman-official as ideal. Shaped the bureaucracy, the family unit, the relationship to authority. Daoism (Taoism) is the counterweight: spontaneity, withdrawal, alignment with the natural order, attributed to the legendary 6th-century BC sage Laozi and his text the Daodejing. Buddhism arrived from India around the 1st century AD, was thoroughly Sinicised by the Tang, and produced most of the cave temples (Mogao at Dunhuang, Yungang at Datong, Longmen near Luoyang, Dazu near Chongqing) and the major mountain pilgrimage networks. Most Chinese people historically (and many today) drew on all three plus folk religion without seeing them as exclusive.

Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) is the year’s biggest event: families gather, red couplets go up on doorways, the year’s debts are settled, fireworks and dumplings are non-negotiable. The Mid-Autumn Festival in September brings mooncakes and family reunions; Qingming in early April is the day to sweep ancestors’ graves; the Dragon Boat Festival in June involves zongzi (sticky rice in bamboo leaves) and races commemorating the Warring States poet Qu Yuan.

Etiquette around the table matters more than around the door. The host orders. Plates are shared, served from communal dishes with chopsticks (some restaurants provide separate serving sets, some do not). Tea is poured for others first; tap two fingers on the table to acknowledge a refill. Toasts are constant, usually with baijiu (a 40–60% sorghum spirit that ranges from drinkable to industrial) or beer, with the cry ganbei meaning “dry the cup”, which is occasionally optional and often not. Never plant chopsticks vertically in a bowl of rice (it resembles incense at a funeral). The bill argument at the end is real and the host is expected to win it.

Modern life in the cities is the second culture. Big-city China runs on smartphones to a degree the rest of the world has not caught up with: payments by QR code, public transport by mini-app, food delivery in twenty minutes, real-name registration on almost every service. The Communist Party is the political background most foreign visitors will not directly encounter; the Great Firewall, which blocks most Western social media, search and news sites, is the part you will encounter on day one.

Pop culture is enormous and largely separate from the West. Chinese cinema (Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke), C-pop and K-influenced idol acts, online novels, mobile games, livestreaming commerce, the short-video app Douyin (TikTok’s domestic sibling). Hong Kong has its own distinct cinematic and musical tradition, with Cantopop, Hong Kong action film, and the noir of the 1980s and 1990s still recognisable internationally.

History

Pre-imperial Chinese civilisations

The earliest writing recognisably ancestral to modern Chinese characters appears on Shang dynasty oracle bones from around the 13th century BC, found in Henan province along the middle Yellow River. The Shang ruled a small core area, perhaps 200 km across, but their bronze ritual vessels and divinatory writing set the template that later dynasties expanded outward.

Between roughly 1046 BC and 256 BC the Zhou dynasty held nominal power over a patchwork of competing states. The era splits into the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC) and the Warring States (475–221 BC), and produced almost all of China’s foundational thought: Confucius (551–479 BC) and his school of ritual hierarchy and ethical government, Laozi and the Daoists, Mozi the universalist, the Legalists who would soon win.

Qin–Han unification

In 221 BC the Qin king Ying Zheng finished off the last rival state and proclaimed himself Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor. He standardised script, currency, axle widths and weights, linked older defensive walls into the prototype of the Great Wall, and was buried east of his capital under the largest tomb mound in Chinese history, surrounded by the Terracotta Army of more than 8,000 soldiers, horses and chariots. The dynasty fell within fifteen years.

The Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) inherited the Qin administrative structure and softened the ideology, making Confucianism the state philosophy under Emperor Wu. The Han pushed the borders to roughly modern proportions, opened the Silk Road through Central Asia, and produced a population of around 60 million by the 2nd century AD. The Chinese majority ethnic group still calls itself Han.

Tang–Song golden ages

After three and a half centuries of disunity the Sui briefly reunited China (581–618) and built the Grand Canal that linked the Yellow and Yangzi rivers; the Tang dynasty (618–907) then used that foundation to run what was, by the 8th century, the largest and richest empire on earth. The Tang capital Chang’an, on the site of modern Xi’an, held about a million people inside walls enclosing 84 km² and hosted communities of Persian, Sogdian, Korean, Japanese, Arab and Jewish merchants. Buddhism reached its peak influence, China’s only ruling empress (Wu Zetian, r. 690–705) held the throne, and the era’s poets (Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei) are still memorised in school today.

The An Lushan rebellion (755–763) broke Tang central control and the dynasty limped on for another 150 years before fragmenting. The Song dynasty that emerged in 960 was geographically smaller but technologically extraordinary: woodblock printing went mass-market, paper money entered circulation, the magnetic compass guided ships, gunpowder weapons appeared, and the civil service examination system became the main route into government. When Jurchen invaders took the northern capital Kaifeng in 1127, the Song court fled south to Hangzhou, where it presided over another century and a half of cultural and economic prosperity.

Yuan–Ming–Qing

The Mongols under Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, finished off the Southern Song in 1279 and ruled all of China as the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) from Khanbalik, the city now called Beijing. They were the first non-Han people to rule the whole country and the last for whom Beijing would not be the capital of a unified China. Yuan rule was short and unpopular; a peasant rebellion produced the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which moved the capital back to Nanjing, then back to Beijing under the Yongle Emperor.

Yongle commissioned the Forbidden City (begun 1406, occupied 1420), the Temple of Heaven, and seven naval expeditions under the eunuch admiral Zheng He that reached East Africa in fleets of more than 200 ships. The Ming rebuilt the Great Wall in stone and brick (almost everything you see today is Ming work) and presided over a long boom that ended in fiscal collapse and peasant rebellions in the 1640s.

The Manchus, a Tungusic people from the northeast, took advantage of the chaos to walk into Beijing in 1644 and founded the Qing (1644–1912), the last imperial dynasty. Three long, capable reigns (Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong) extended the empire to roughly its current borders, doubled the population, and made China the world’s largest economy through most of the 18th century. The 19th century reversed everything. Two Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60), a treaty that handed Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity, the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) that killed perhaps 20 million, and humiliating defeats by Japan (1894–95) and the Eight-Nation Alliance (1900) hollowed the dynasty out. The boy-emperor Puyi abdicated in February 1912.

Republic era

The Republic of China was declared in 1912 with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president, but real power fragmented immediately. The 1910s and 1920s belonged to regional warlords; the 1930s to the Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek, formally based in Nanjing, fighting the Chinese Communist Party (founded 1921 in Shanghai) on one front and a Japanese invasion on the other.

The Japanese invasion of 1937 turned into the Second Sino-Japanese War, fought on Chinese soil for eight years and merging into World War II after Pearl Harbor. The Nanjing Massacre of December 1937 still shapes Chinese-Japanese relations. The Nationalist government retreated upriver to Chongqing and bore the brunt of the conventional fighting; the Communists ran a parallel guerrilla war in the north. After Japan surrendered in 1945, the two sides resumed civil war. The Communists won. On 1 October 1949 Mao declared the People’s Republic of China from Tiananmen Gate; Chiang fled to Taiwan with two million followers and the Republic of China’s gold reserves.

PRC era

The first decade of the PRC redistributed land, nationalised industry, allied with the Soviet Union, fought the United States to a draw in Korea (1950–53), and laid the institutional template still in place. Mao’s two great campaigns then pulled the country off course. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62), an attempt to industrialise through backyard steel furnaces and forced collectivisation, produced a famine that killed at least 30 million people on most modern estimates. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) closed schools, destroyed temples and historical sites at scale, and turned tens of millions of people into political targets. Mao died in September 1976; his widow Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four were arrested within a month.

Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012 and President in 2013, and a 2018 constitutional amendment removed presidential term limits. The current era is marked by recentralisation of party authority, an anti-corruption drive that has touched more than a million officials, the Belt and Road infrastructure programme abroad, a tightening of policy in Xinjiang and Tibet, and since 2020 a substantial reshaping of the Hong Kong political system through the National Security Law.

Nature

China holds the largest national park system in Asia and around 15% of its territory under protected status, with 56 UNESCO sites (cultural and natural combined) as of 2024.

The headline natural sites split into a few clusters. Karst country: the Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo, the Wulingyuan pinnacles in Hunan that inspired the Avatar landscapes (UNESCO since 1992), and the South China Karst (UNESCO 2007), which covers parts of Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan and Chongqing. Alpine: Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong in northern Sichuan, with terraced turquoise lakes; Yading and the holy peaks of Daocheng in western Sichuan; Mount Siguniang and the Hengduan ranges. Sacred mountains: the five Daoist peaks (Tai Shan, Hua Shan in Shaanxi, Heng Shan north and south, Song Shan) and the four Buddhist mountains (Putuoshan, Wutai, Jiuhua, Emei in Sichuan).

Wildlife is concentrated in three big zones. The bamboo belt of Sichuan holds wild giant pandas, mostly in protected areas including Wolong; the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base is the easy-access version. The Tibetan plateau supports wild yak, Tibetan antelope, snow leopard and black-necked crane in dedicated reserves. The southern subtropics in Yunnan and Guangxi are home to the country’s last Indo-Chinese tigers, Asian elephants, white-cheeked gibbons and crested ibis.

Hong Kong, against expectation, holds the densest concentration of country park per capita in the region: 40% of the SAR’s land area is protected, the MacLehose Trail runs 100 km along the spine of the New Territories, and there are 18 country parks, including Tai Mo Shan (957 m, the territory’s highest peak).

Getting there

Most travellers fly in. The big international gateways on the mainland are Beijing Capital (PEK) and the newer Beijing Daxing (PKX), Shanghai Pudong (PVG), Guangzhou Baiyun (CAN) in Guangdong, Chengdu Tianfu (TFU) in Sichuan and Shenzhen Bao’an (SZX). Hong Kong International (HKG) on Lantau is one of the busiest passenger and freight airports on earth and an alternative entry point that comes with a 90-day visa-free stamp for most Western passports. Macao (MFM) is small but useful for low-cost flights from Southeast Asia.

Overland entries that work for foreigners: Hong Kong–Shenzhen border crossings (Lo Wu, Lok Ma Chau, Futian, Heung Yuen Wai) and the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge into Macao and Zhuhai by bus. From Vietnam, the Friendship Pass at Pingxiang in Guangxi is the most-used crossing, with through trains from Hanoi to Nanning. From Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Nepal, Laos and Myanmar there are land borders, in varying states of openness depending on the year and the politics. The trans-Mongolian and trans-Manchurian trains from Moscow run weekly.

By sea, the main passenger ferries are the Pearl River delta web (Hong Kong to Macao, Shenzhen, Zhuhai) and a thin trickle of Japan-Shanghai and Korea-Tianjin sailings.

Getting around

The high-speed rail network (CRH/CR) is the default way to move around the eastern two thirds of the country. As of 2024 it runs more than 45,000 km of dedicated high-speed track, with G-trains topping out at 350 km/h and serving every major city east of Lanzhou. Beijing to Shanghai takes 4h 18m on the fastest service. Beijing to Xi’an is around 4h 30m. Guangzhou to Shenzhen is 30 minutes. Hong Kong is on the network via the West Kowloon terminus, with direct trains to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and beyond. Tickets are passport-tied and can be booked on 12306 or through Trip.com 14–15 days ahead.

For the long west-to-east hauls or to higher-altitude regions the network does not yet reach, sleeper trains and flights cover the gap. Domestic flights are dense, cheap and frequently delayed. Internal carriers include Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, Hainan, Spring, Juneyao and Sichuan Airlines.

Within cities, the metro is the easy default. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Chongqing all run extensive networks; Hong Kong’s MTR is one of the world’s most-used. Most metros now accept a passport-linked QR code from Alipay or WeChat Pay’s Tour Pass mini-program, removing the need for cash and physical tickets. Taxis are metered and cheap by Western standards but require destinations written in Chinese characters; the Didi app (English available) is the safer bet outside major airport ranks.

Driving is not realistic for foreigners on short trips: Chinese licence rules don’t recognise International Driving Permits, the traffic culture is its own thing, and parking, tolls and signage lean exclusively on Chinese. Hire a driver instead through hotels, Trip.com or local agencies. In Hong Kong and Macao, foreigners can drive on an IDP and most rentals come with English signage, but public transport in both is so good that almost no visitors bother.

Where to stay

Mainland Chinese hotels divide into international chains (Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Shangri-La, IHG) for predictable Western standards, large domestic chains (Jin Jiang, Huazhu/H World with Hanting and Ji brands, BTG Homeinn) for solid mid-market, and a long tail of local guesthouses. The legal point that catches most foreign travellers is that not every hotel is licensed to register foreign guests, and budget options sometimes turn you away at check-in. Booking through Trip.com (Ctrip) or Agoda filters for foreigner-licensed properties; calling ahead in Chinese works otherwise.

Boutique courtyard hotels (siheyuan) are a Beijing speciality, set in restored hutong alleys with rooms around a central garden. Old-town guesthouses in Pingyao, Lijiang and Yangshuo are similar. Tibetan and Naxi homestays operate widely in Sichuan and Yunnan. Hostels in the Hostelling International network are the easiest backpacker option and usually have decent English-speaking front desks.

Hong Kong and Macao run on different price scales. Hong Kong land scarcity makes hotels small and expensive; budget options cluster in Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui’s Mirador Mansions and Chungking Mansions, both of which have been guesthouse warrens since the 1970s. Macao splits between the casino mega-resorts on Cotai and a smaller crop of historic guesthouses on the peninsula.

Check-in everywhere needs your passport and a deposit (cash or credit card preauthorisation). Hotels register foreign guests with local police automatically; if you stay anywhere unregistered (a friend’s flat, an Airbnb), you need to register yourself at the local police station within 24 hours. Wi-Fi is universal and usually fast; on the mainland, many hotel networks block Western services without a VPN.

Visas & entry

Mainland Chinese visa. Most Western passports need a tourist visa (L visa) to enter mainland China. Apply through a Chinese visa centre (CVASC) in your country of residence; processing is typically 4–7 working days plus appointment lead time. Fees vary by nationality (US passport holders pay the most, around USD 140 for a 10-year multiple-entry as of 2024). The application asks for hotel bookings, a flight itinerary and an invitation letter or detailed travel plan; do not lie on it.

Several visa-free routes have opened since late 2023:

• Unilateral visa-free: 30-day visa-free entry for citizens of 38 countries as of 2024, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Malaysia and several others. Check the current Chinese MFA list before booking.
• 240-hour transit visa-free: 60+ ports of entry permit visa-free transit of up to 10 days for citizens of 54 countries (including the UK, US, Canada, EU member states, Japan), provided you have a confirmed onward ticket to a third country and stay within the eligible region.
• Hainan visa-free for tourists from 59 countries, valid only on Hainan island.

Each entry on a multiple-entry visa allows up to 30 days for tourism (60 for some). Overstaying carries fines of around 500 yuan per day and can compromise future visas.

Hong Kong and Macao visa rules are separate. Most Western and Commonwealth passports get visa-free entry to Hong Kong (90 days for UK, EU, US, Canada, Australia, Japan; 14–30 for some others) and Macao (30–90 days for most of the same passports). Crossing from the mainland into either SAR counts as leaving China. Single-entry mainland visas burn on exit; you need a multi-entry mainland visa to come back in.

Stay-extension applications go through local Public Security Bureau Exit-Entry offices in mainland cities; allow at least seven days. Hong Kong extensions are processed by the Immigration Department in Wan Chai. Always carry your passport: police random checks on foreigners do happen and a hotel keycard is not ID.

Money & budget

Three currencies cover the territory.

Mainland China: renminbi (CNY/RMB), symbol ¥. Basic unit the yuan (informally kuai); 10 jiao (informally mao) to a yuan. Notes run 1, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 yuan; coins for 1 yuan and 1, 5 jiao. The currency is partly convertible: it can be exchanged abroad and in mainland banks but is not freely floating against the dollar. As of 2024 the rate hovers around 7 CNY = 1 USD.

Hong Kong: Hong Kong dollar (HKD), symbol HK$. Pegged to the US dollar in a band around 7.75–7.85 HKD = 1 USD since 1983. Notes uniquely are issued by three commercial banks (HSBC, Standard Chartered, Bank of China) plus the government, so designs vary across banks. Fully convertible.

Macao: pataca (MOP), symbol MOP$. Pegged to HKD at MOP$1.03 = HK$1. Macao shops mostly accept HKD at par as a courtesy; Hong Kong shops do not accept MOP. Change patacas before leaving Macao or you will struggle to use them.

Payments on the mainland have moved almost entirely to QR-code apps. Alipay and WeChat Pay between them handle the overwhelming majority of retail, transport and small-merchant transactions; both now accept linked international Visa and Mastercard credit cards under “Tour Pass” or international-wallet flows. Set this up before you arrive. Foreign credit cards work in international hotel chains, airline counters, premium retail and some restaurants; nowhere else reliably.

ATMs that accept foreign cards exist at every major bank in mainland cities; Bank of China, ICBC and HSBC are the safest bets. Per-transaction limits are typically 2,500 or 3,000 yuan. In Hong Kong and Macao, ATMs and credit-card terminals are universal and behave like anywhere in the developed world.

Tipping is not customary on the mainland, in restaurants, taxis or hotels; it confuses people more than it pleases them. In Hong Kong and Macao, tipping is light: round up taxis, leave 10% in restaurants where service charge is not already added.

Languages

“Chinese” is a family of related but mutually unintelligible languages, written with the same set of characters and held together by a common standard. Standard Mandarin (Putonghua, “common speech”) is the official spoken language of the People’s Republic, based on the Beijing dialect, and is the language of school, broadcast media, government and the high-speed rail announcements. Around 80% of mainland residents now speak it, with rates highest in Beijing, the northeast and major cities, and lowest in rural southern provinces and ethnic-minority areas.

The other major Chinese languages a traveller will encounter: Cantonese (Yue) in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao and parts of Guangxi, with around 80 million speakers and a long literary tradition. Shanghainese (Wu) in Shanghai, Suzhou and the lower Yangzi delta. Min varieties in Fujian and Taiwan. Hakka (Kejia) scattered through southern China and the diaspora. Sichuanese, technically a Mandarin dialect but distinct enough that mainland-Mandarin speakers struggle. The written language is mostly the same: simplified characters in mainland China and Singapore, traditional characters in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

China also recognises 55 ethnic minorities and dozens of non-Sinitic languages: Tibetan and its dialects on the western plateau, Uyghur (a Turkic language) in Xinjiang, Mongolian, Manchu, Korean in the northeast, Zhuang in Guangxi (China’s second-most-spoken native language after Mandarin), Yi, Dong, Miao, Bai, Hani, Naxi and many more across the southwest.

English is widely taught but unevenly spoken. International hotels, airline check-in desks and major museum ticket counters in big cities will manage; small restaurants, convenience stores, taxi drivers and most train station staff will not. Translation apps that use the camera (Google Translate, Pleco, Microsoft Translator) handle menus and signs adequately, though Google services need a VPN on the mainland. In Hong Kong and Macao, English signage and basic English-speaking staff are the norm in tourist contexts.

Safety & health

Violent crime against foreigners is rare on the mainland and rarer still in Hong Kong and Macao; both SARs consistently rank among the safest cities in the world by international metrics. The realistic concerns are the everyday ones: pickpockets in train stations and tourist hotspots; the long-running “tea ceremony” and “art student” scams in Beijing and Xi’an where friendly English-speakers steer you to a private room and present a four-figure bill; counterfeit bills (less of an issue now that nobody uses cash); taxi overcharging at airports and tourist sites where a metered ride suddenly is not metered.

Health risks are mostly food and air. Tap water is not drinkable anywhere on the mainland or in the SARs; bottled or boiled is universal practice. Street food is mostly fine if it is busy, freshly cooked and hot. Air quality in northern cities (Beijing, Xi’an, Tianjin) deteriorates badly between November and March, with PM2.5 readings sometimes 5–10× WHO guidelines; an N95 or KN95 mask is reasonable insurance, and AQI apps work without a VPN.

Roads are dangerous by Western standards: pedestrian crossings are advisory rather than enforced, and right-on-red and scooters on pavements are normal. Look both ways twice. The Tibetan plateau, the Sichuan-Tibet highway and parts of western Yunnan are subject to altitude sickness above roughly 3,000 m; ascend gradually and skip the trip if you have known cardiac issues.

Politically sensitive topics (Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan independence, June 1989, Hong Kong protests, Falun Gong, Xi Jinping personally) are best left out of public conversations and out of writing on Chinese platforms. Foreign journalists working without accreditation, photographers near military or government buildings, and demonstrators of any kind have been detained and deported. None of this affects ordinary tourism, but the line is real.

Practical info

The Great Firewall and VPNs. Mainland China blocks Google (search, Maps, Gmail, Drive, YouTube), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, X/Twitter, Wikipedia, most Western news sites and many cloud services. A working VPN, installed and tested before arrival, is essentially mandatory if you need any of the above; downloading one inside China is hard because the app stores filter them. Recommended setups: ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Astrill or a self-hosted Wireguard/Outline server. Hong Kong and Macao do not block these services and are the easiest places to top up if your VPN fails on the mainland.

Payments. Cash works in remote areas; everywhere else runs on Alipay or WeChat Pay QR codes. Both now accept linked foreign credit cards via international flows; set up before you arrive. Western credit cards work in international hotels and a thin slice of upmarket retail, but not in most restaurants, taxis, shops or transport. ATMs of Bank of China, ICBC and HSBC accept Visa, Mastercard and major foreign cards.

SIMs and connectivity. International roaming on most carriers works fine but bypasses the firewall (a useful side effect). Local SIMs from China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom require passport registration and will route through the firewall like any local connection. Hong Kong PCCW or 3 SIMs are open internet and work across the border on roaming.

Two visa regimes for the SARs. Hong Kong and Macao run separate immigration. Most Western, EU and Commonwealth passports get visa-free stays of 14–180 days in each (90 days for UK, US, Canada, Australia, EU; 30 days for Macao). Crossing from mainland China into Hong Kong or Macao counts as exiting China; re-entering the mainland requires a fresh entry, so a single-entry mainland visa will not get you back in. Plan multiple-entry mainland visas accordingly, or sequence your trip so the SARs come first or last.

Currencies. Mainland uses the renminbi (CNY/RMB), abbreviated ¥, with the basic unit yuan (or kuai in spoken Chinese). Hong Kong uses the Hong Kong dollar (HKD), pegged to USD at roughly 7.8. Macao uses the pataca (MOP), pegged to HKD at 1.03. Most Macao shops accept HKD at par, but you cannot generally spend MOP in Hong Kong.

Voltage and plugs. 220V/50Hz across all three jurisdictions. Mainland uses Type A (US two-pin), C (European two-pin) and I (Australian three-pin) sockets, often combined in one outlet. Hong Kong and Macao use the British Type G three-pin. A universal adapter covers everything.

Time zone. All of mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao run on UTC+8 (Beijing Time / Hong Kong Time). No daylight saving anywhere.

When to go

The two prime windows for almost all of China are mid-April to late May and mid-September to late October. Spring brings warm weather and blossoms before the summer rains; autumn brings clear skies, comfortable temperatures and the year’s lowest humidity. Both are also high-season prices for flights and hotels.

The hard dates to avoid are the Chinese national holidays, when domestic travel essentially shuts down for outsiders. Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is the biggest, falling between late January and mid-February depending on the lunar calendar; transit is jammed for two weeks before and after, prices triple, and many small businesses outside major cities close for ten days. The 1–7 May Labour Day holiday and the 1–7 October National Day Golden Week pack every famous site (Great Wall, Terracotta Army, Li River) past breaking point. Genuinely move your dates if you can.

Mid-summer (late June through August) is hot, wet and crowded. The Yangzi basin from Chongqing to Shanghai is genuinely punishing in July; Hong Kong, Macao and Guangdong are typhoon-vulnerable and humid. The exception is the Tibetan plateau, the Sichuan-Tibet road, and the high pastures of western Sichuan, all of which need summer to be passable. The northern grasslands and Inner Mongolia open up in July and August.

Winter (December to early March) is the off-season everywhere except the ski resorts and Harbin’s ice festival. The advantages are real: low prices, half-empty Forbidden City, the Terracotta Warriors with breathing room. The disadvantages are real too: anything outdoor in the north hurts, the Yangzi corridor is grey and damp, and many higher-altitude areas (parts of Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet) are inaccessible by road.

For specific reasons to be in specific places: the Longji Rice Terraces in Guangxi are at their most photogenic in late May to June (flooded mirrors) and mid-September to early October (gold). Yangshuo and Guilin look best in autumn after the summer rains have washed the air. Hong Kong’s clearest air is November to February. Macao’s Grand Prix runs the third weekend of November and books out the city. Cherry blossoms in Wuhan, Nanjing and Beijing peak in late March to early April.