China

Overview

China is the size of a continent and runs on one clock. Nine and a half million square kilometres, 1.4 billion people, sixty UNESCO World Heritage Sites and a single time zone, Beijing Time, from the Pacific coast to the Pamirs. The scale is the first thing you plan around, and the reason the trains matter: the high-speed network passed 48,000 km at the end of 2024, and the trunk lines between Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu and Guangzhou run at up to 350 km/h.

This guide covers the classic loop and its edges: Beijing and the Great Wall; Xi’an and the Terracotta Army in Shaanxi; Chengdu, pandas and hotpot in Sichuan; the river city of Chongqing; the karst country of Guilin and Yangshuo in Guangxi; Cantonese Guangdong with Shenzhen; and the two Special Administrative Regions, Hong Kong and Macao, which have their own currencies, borders and rules and are treated here as regions of the same trip.

Three practical facts shape everything else. Mainland China runs on a separate internet, so Google, WhatsApp and most Western apps need a VPN installed before you land. Payment is by QR code through Alipay or WeChat Pay, and cash is a fallback rather than the norm. And English is thin outside international hotels and the SARs, so a translation app and a little pinyin do real work. None of this is a barrier once it is set up; all of it is a problem if you discover it on arrival.

The good news is timing. Since late 2023 a long list of passports, including most of the EU, the UK, Australia, Japan and South Korea, can enter for 30 days without a visa, and the arrangement currently runs to the end of 2026. For the first time in decades, a China trip can be booked like any other.

Regions

Beijing

Beijing is the political capital, the imperial capital of the Yuan, Ming and Qing, and the place every itinerary touches. The Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven are inside the old city, the Summer Palace is on the north-western edge, the Ming Tombs are out past the ring roads, and the Great Wall is an hour or two north on day trips to Mutianyu, Badaling or Jinshanling. The municipality holds six World Heritage inscriptions on its own. The flat grid of hutong alleys around the Drum Tower and the lakes at Houhai is what survives of the older city, and the food is northern and wheat-based: roast duck, lamb hotpot, hand-pulled noodles, jianbing from a griddle on the corner. The region page covers the capital and its day trips; the city has its own page for the sights inside the ring roads.

Shaanxi

Shaanxi is where the Chinese state began. The Qin king Ying Zheng unified the country from here in 221 BC and was buried east of Xi’an under the mound that produced the Terracotta Army. Qin, Han, Sui and Tang all ruled from Chang’an, the Tang name for Xi’an, which in the 8th century was the largest city on earth and the eastern end of the Silk Road. The Ming city wall still encloses the centre, and the Muslim Quarter inside it is the legacy of the merchants who came down the trade routes. Beyond the city, Hua Shan, the western peak of the Five Great Mountains, rises to 2,155 metres about 120 km east, with a cable car to the North Peak and the cliff-edge plank walk that is the most photographed footpath in China. North of Xi’an the Loess Plateau begins, with Yan’an, the Communist base of the 1930s and 1940s, at the far end of it.

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 wild population, around 1,900 animals at the last estimate, lives in six mountain ranges mostly in Sichuan, and the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is the accessible version. It is teahouse country, with Chengdu’s Renmin Park as the textbook, and above all chilli country: the numbing mala effect of Sichuan peppercorn is unlike anything in a Western kitchen. Dujiangyan, the irrigation system built around 256 BC that still waters the Chengdu plain, and the Leshan Giant Buddha, carved into a river cliff in the 8th century, are the two big day trips. West of the basin the road climbs onto the plateau through Kangding and Litang, and the north holds Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong, the valleys of terraced turquoise lakes.

Chongqing

Chongqing was carved out of Sichuan in 1997 as a municipality on the same tier as Beijing and Shanghai. The city sits on a peninsula where the Jialing meets the Yangtze, and it builds up cliffs rather than across plains: a monorail that runs through a block of flats, a stilt-house complex lit gold every night, a park on the ridge with both rivers below it. Hotpot here is oilier and more aggressive than its Sichuan parent, and the Yangtze cruise downstream through the Three Gorges leaves from the docks at Chaotianmen: the Qutang, Wu and Xiling gorges run 311 km from Baidicheng to Yichang, wider and lower-looking since the dam raised the water in 2006. The Dazu Rock Carvings, more than 50,000 statues cut between the 9th and 13th centuries, are a half-day west.

Guangxi

Guangxi is the karst landscape on the postcards: limestone pinnacles rising from paddy fields and the Li River, which flows 164 km from Xing’an to Pingle and is at its best on the stretch between Guilin and Yangshuo, the one printed on the 20-yuan note. It is also the autonomous region of the Zhuang, China’s largest ethnic minority at around 17 million people, and home to Dong, Miao and Yao communities whose wooden drum towers and rice terraces anchor the north. The Longsheng terraces, about 100 km from Guilin and built some 650 years ago between 600 and 800 metres, are flooded in early June and gold in autumn. The south runs to the Vietnamese border, where Detian Falls straddles the line and the Friendship Pass at Pingxiang is the overland route to Hanoi.

Guangdong

Guangdong is the Cantonese-speaking south, the export engine of the modern economy and the historic departure point for most of the Chinese diaspora. Guangzhou is the old foreign-trade port with the Canton Tower on the river and the best dim sum in the country; Shenzhen, across the bay from Hong Kong, was a fishing town in 1980 and now has close to eighteen million people. Dim sum is from here. So are the Kaiping watchtowers, a UNESCO-listed cluster of fortified family houses built by returning emigrants in the early 20th century. Most visitors use the province as a corridor between the mainland and Hong Kong; it rewards a couple of days on its own.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region: part of China, run under its own legal system, currency and immigration since the 1997 handover. Cantonese is the working language, English is on every sign, and the Hong Kong dollar is the money. The standard views (the harbour from the Star Ferry, the city from the Peak) are standard for a reason; the surprise is that around 40 percent of the territory is country park, with ridge trails and beaches a bus ride from Central. The sights on this site’s pages are the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront with its Clock Tower and Museum of Art, Victoria Harbour itself, the Big Buddha above Ngong Ping on Lantau, and Disneyland for those travelling with children.

Macao

Macao is the other SAR, about 33 km² of peninsula and reclaimed islands on the west side of the Pearl River estuary, Portuguese from 1557 to 1999. The historic centre, listed by UNESCO in 2005, is cobbled squares, baroque churches and Cantonese temples within a few hundred metres of each other. Across the bridges on Cotai are the casino resorts that overtook Las Vegas in gaming revenue in 2006. The currency is the pataca, the working language Cantonese, and Portuguese is mostly on the street signs and the menus, where Macanese cooking is the best reason to stay for dinner. The Macau Tower, the Mandarin’s House and the Museum of Macau are the three sights with their own pages.

Major cities

Beijing

Beijing needs four days, and most people give it three. The Forbidden City takes a morning on its own and must be booked online up to a week ahead, since it sells nothing at the gate; the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace are half days each; the Great Wall is a full day whichever section you choose. Between them are the hutong around Houhai and the Drum Tower, the 798 art district in the old factory quarter to the north-east, the National Museum on Tiananmen Square, and the food streets of the old city. The metro reaches all of it, and a passport-linked Alipay code opens the gates. Air quality is worst from November to March; late September and October are the weeks to be here.

Xi’an

Xi’an is a two-day city with a one-day headline. The Terracotta Army is about 40 km east and takes most of a day with the mausoleum park, on a timed ticket booked under your passport; the second day belongs to the Ming city wall, which you can cycle round, the Muslim Quarter’s food street behind the Drum Tower, the Great Mosque, and the two Wild Goose Pagodas from the Tang era, one ticketed and one free. Eat roujiamo (braised pork in a flatbread), yangrou paomo (lamb broth over torn bread) and biangbiang noodles, whose name uses a character so elaborate that most keyboards cannot type it. Hua Shan is a long day trip by high-speed train.

Chengdu

Chengdu is the slow city, and it knows it. The panda base opens early and empties by late morning when the animals fall asleep, so go first thing; Renmin Park is for tea, ear-cleaning and mahjong; the Wenshu Monastery quarter and Jinli street cover the temple and old-street side; and Sichuan opera, with its face-changing and fire-spitting, plays nightly in the teahouses. Hotpot and chuanchuan (skewers cooked in the same broth) are the evening plan. Leshan and Dujiangyan are each a day trip by train, and Chengdu Tianfu airport makes the city a sensible entry point for the whole south-west.

Chongqing

Chongqing is vertical. The Yuzhong peninsula stacks a downtown on a ridge between two rivers, and the sights are pieces of that geography: Hongya Cave lit up on the Jialing, Liziba station where the monorail runs through a building, Eling Park on the summit, the Yangtze cableway from Xiaoshizi, and Ciqikou, the old porcelain port out on Line 1. The wartime capital left bomb shelters, embassies and the Stilwell Museum. Two days is enough; three if a Three Gorges cruise starts here, and the cruises fill the docks at Chaotianmen every evening.

Shenzhen

Shenzhen is the city that did not exist. A market town in 1980, the first Special Economic Zone, and now one of the largest cities on earth, it is where China’s electronics, drones and electric cars are designed, and the Huaqiangbei electronics market is the tourist sight that comes from that. The OCT Loft creative district and the parks along the bay are the softer side. It is also the land border with Hong Kong, thirty minutes from Guangzhou by high-speed train, and a useful first or last night on the mainland.

Guilin

Guilin is the base town for the Li River, with a few karst hills of its own (Elephant Trunk Hill, the Reed Flute Cave, the Sun and Moon pagodas on the lake) and the Longsheng rice terraces a hundred kilometres north. Guilin rice noodles are the breakfast. Most people stay a night, take the boat or a bamboo raft down the river past the 20-yuan-note view at Xingping, and finish in Yangshuo.

Yangshuo

Yangshuo is the small town at the downstream end of the Li River, surrounded on all sides by the pinnacles. The things to do are outdoors: cycling the Yulong River valley, rafting, climbing on the limestone, and watching the cormorant fishermen at dusk. West Street has been the backpacker strip since the 1980s, and the villages a few kilometres out are where to stay if you want the karst without the karaoke.

Suggested routes

Geography & landscape

China’s land tilts west to east in three steps. The first is the Tibetan plateau in the south-west, averaging over 4,000 metres, holding the headwaters of the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers, and topping out on the Chinese-Nepali border at the summit of Everest, 8,849 metres. The second is the belt of high basins and mountains in the centre and west: the Tarim Basin, the Gobi, the Loess Plateau of Shaanxi, the Sichuan basin and the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau, mostly between 1,000 and 2,500 metres. The third is the lowland east, where most of the people, farms and cities are.

Two rivers do most of the work. The Yellow River runs 5,464 km through the Loess Plateau and the North China Plain, carrying the silt that names it, and reaches the sea north of Shandong. The Yangtze is longer at 6,300 km, the third-longest river on earth, and drains a basin of 1.8 million km² that takes in Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan and the delta at Shanghai. The Three Gorges between Chongqing and Yichang are the river’s signature stretch, and the dam completed in 2006 raised the water through them by around 100 metres. The third river that matters to this guide is the Pearl, whose delta holds Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macao and more people than any other estuary on earth.

The mountains that matter to a traveller: the Qinling, which divides north from south China in climate and in cooking, with Hua Shan at its eastern end; the Hengduan ranges of western Sichuan, where the great rivers run parallel through gorges 4,000 metres deep; the sacred peaks of the east (Huangshan, Tai Shan, Emei in Sichuan); and the karst belt across Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan, one of the largest limestone landscapes on the planet and the source of every cone-shaped hill on every China poster. The Sichuan basin sits on a fault line, and the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake that killed tens of thousands is still a recent memory in Chengdu.

The coast runs about 14,500 km from the Korean border to the Vietnamese one, with the big estuaries at the Yellow River, the Yangtze and the Pearl River. Hainan, in the far south, is the only large island under mainland administration. The geography explains the itinerary: the classic loop stays on the third step, in the east and south, and the trains that link it run through the flat country where the cities were always going to be.

Climate

The chart below is for the geographic centre of the country, a point on the Loess Plateau near Lanzhou: January highs around freezing and nights near -10°C, July highs of about 25°C, and most of the year’s modest rain falling from June to September. It is a fair picture of the dry interior and a poor one of anywhere you are likely to stay, because China spans more than 50 degrees of latitude and has three travel climates.

The north (Beijing, Xi’an, the Great Wall) has cold dry winters, around -3°C in a Beijing January with clear skies and biting wind, and hot stormy summers in the low 30s. Spring is short and dusty; autumn, from mid-September to the end of October, is the clean, clear season and the best time to be anywhere north of the Yangtze.

The Yangtze basin and the south-west (Chengdu, Chongqing, the river corridor) sit under cloud through the winter, 5 to 10°C and rarely sunny, then turn into a steam bath from June to August. Chongqing passes 38°C routinely, and the humidity makes every reading feel higher.

The deep south is subtropical and runs on a typhoon calendar. Hong Kong, Macao and the Pearl River delta are 15 to 18°C in January and 28 to 30°C from May to September with humidity around 80 percent; typhoon season is roughly July to October, and a Hong Kong T8 signal closes the city and stops the Macao ferries for the day.

When to go follows from that. Mid-April to late May and mid-September to late October are the two windows that work almost everywhere. The dates to avoid are the national holidays: Chinese New Year, which falls on the new moon between 21 January and 20 February and empties the cities into the countryside for a full week; the 1 to 7 May Labour Day break; and the 1 to 7 October Golden Week, when every famous site is past capacity. Winter is cheap and empty, and the Forbidden City with room to move is worth a cold morning; the Yangtze corridor in December is grey, and the high roads of western Sichuan are shut.

Pack for the place, not the country. Beijing in February needs a down coat and Hong Kong in February needs a light jacket, and no single bag covers an itinerary that does both.

Food & drink

Chinese cooking is conventionally divided into eight regional schools, most named for a province, and a trip through the regions in this guide crosses three of them. The other five turn up on menus everywhere, because every big city has restaurants from every province.

Sichuan (Chuan) is the chilli school, but the trademark is mala, the numbing-and-hot effect of Sichuan peppercorn on top of the chilli. Mapo tofu, kung pao chicken, dan dan noodles, twice-cooked pork and fish-fragrant aubergine are the dishes anyone will recognise; hotpot, where you cook your own ingredients in a divided pot of red and white broth, is the Sichuan and Chongqing export now eaten in every city in China. Chengdu’s version is gentler and more varied; Chongqing’s is a slab of beef tallow and dried chilli, eaten outdoors in a heatwave.

Cantonese (Yue) is the southern school you know from Chinatowns abroad, with freshness over seasoning and steaming, stir-frying and roasting as the methods. The headline meal is yum cha, dim sum with tea in the late morning, in Guangdong and Hong Kong: har gow, siu mai, char siu buns, cheung fun rice rolls, and the trolleys or the tick-sheet that bring them. Roast goose, char siu, steamed fish, congee, wonton noodles and the dessert soups are the rest of the repertoire, and Hong Kong adds its own café culture of milk tea, pineapple buns and egg tarts.

Northern cooking, with Shandong (Lu) as its classical parent, is the wheat belt: dumplings, steamed buns, hand-pulled noodles, Beijing roast duck carved at the table and zhajiang noodles with fermented bean paste. Shaanxi adds its own noodle and flatbread culture, and the Muslim Quarter of Xi’an is the place to eat it: roujiamo, yangrou paomo, cold liangpi noodles and skewers of cumin lamb.

Two regional specialities from this guide’s loop deserve their own line. Guilin rice noodles, eaten for breakfast in Guangxi with pickles, peanuts and a spoon of chilli, are the reason Guilin people get up early. And Macao has Macanese cooking, a Portuguese-Cantonese-African hybrid that exists nowhere else: African chicken, minchi (minced beef with potato), salt cod, and the local version of the custard tart.

Drink is tea first. Green tea is the everyday cup and Longjing from Hangzhou the famous one; oolong, semi-oxidised, comes from Fujian (Tieguanyin) and the south; black tea, which the Chinese call red, from Anhui and Yunnan; and dark pu-erh, aged and earthy, from Yunnan. Teahouses have been public living rooms since the Tang, and Chengdu’s are the best place to spend an afternoon in one. The spirit is baijiu, distilled mostly from sorghum at 35 to 60 percent, the best-selling liquor on earth by volume and the one you will be toasted with; Moutai from Guizhou and Wuliangye from Sichuan are the prestige bottles. Beer is light, cheap and everywhere (Tsingtao, Snow, Harbin, Yanjing), and Chinese wine is improving fast but rarely on a restaurant list.

Breakfast is the meal foreigners miss by eating at the hotel. On the street it is soy milk and a fried dough stick, steamed buns, congee with pickles, jianbing in the north, rice noodles in the south, and it is finished by eight. Lunch is early and fast; dinner is the social meal, starting around six.

Two table conventions save embarrassment. Dishes are shared and placed in the middle, and everyone reaches in; rice comes late in a proper meal, not first. Tea is poured for others before yourself, and two fingers tapped on the table are the silent thank-you for a refill. Ordering is done by the host, usually one dish per person plus one; asking for a menu with pictures is normal and the camera on a translation app does the rest. Vegetarian eating is hard outside Buddhist temple restaurants, since “vegetable” dishes are routinely cooked in meat stock; wo chi su (“I eat vegetarian”) helps. Tap water is not drinkable; bottled or boiled is universal, and every hotel room has a kettle.

Culture & society

Three traditions shaped the country’s habits for two thousand years. Confucianism is the social blueprint: hierarchy, ritual, family duty, deference to age and learning, the scholar-official as the ideal. Daoism is the counterweight, spontaneity and alignment with nature, attributed to the sage Laozi. Buddhism arrived from India around the 1st century AD, was thoroughly domesticated under the Tang, and produced the cave temples (Dazu near Chongqing, Mogao, Yungang, Longmen) and the mountain pilgrimage networks. Most people drew on all three plus folk religion without seeing any contradiction, and a temple visit today still involves incense, a fortune stick and a photograph. Islam came down the Silk Road and is oldest in Xi’an, whose Great Mosque is built like a Chinese temple; Christianity is small and growing.

The calendar is lunar. Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival, runs from the eve to the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day and is the year’s great event: families travel home in the largest annual migration on earth, red couplets go on doorways, debts are settled, married adults hand red envelopes (hongbao, or lai see in Cantonese) to children and the unmarried, and dumplings and fireworks are compulsory. The Mid-Autumn Festival in September brings mooncakes and a full moon; Qingming in early April is for sweeping ancestors’ graves; the Dragon Boat Festival in June has races and zongzi, sticky rice in bamboo leaves. Each is a public holiday, and each moves the whole country.

Etiquette matters at the table more than anywhere else. The host orders and the host pays, after an argument the host is expected to win. Toasts are frequent, with beer or baijiu; ganbei means empty the glass, and sometimes it is optional. Chopsticks are never stood upright in a bowl of rice, which is how incense is offered to the dead. Gifts are given and received with both hands and opened later. “Face” is real: public criticism, losing your temper or making someone admit a mistake in front of others costs more than it gains, and a smile with a vague answer often means no.

The public life of the cities happens in parks and squares. Early morning is tai chi, sword forms and badminton; evening is square dancing, ballroom under the flyover, mahjong on folding tables and grandparents with toddlers. Teahouses are the Sichuan version, with ear-cleaners and Sichuan opera, whose face-changing and fire-spitting stunts have been played in Chengdu since around 1700. Cantonese opera fills the same role in Guangdong and Hong Kong. KTV, private-room karaoke, is where colleagues and friends go after dinner.

Daily life runs through the phone to a degree the rest of the world has not reached: QR payments, public transport, restaurant ordering, food delivery in twenty minutes, real-name registration for almost everything. The Communist Party is the political background most visitors never directly meet; the Great Firewall, which blocks most Western platforms, is the part you meet on day one. Surveillance cameras are everywhere and nobody remarks on them.

Pop culture is huge and mostly separate from the West: Douyin (the domestic TikTok), livestream shopping, online novels, mobile games, C-pop, costume dramas set in the Tang and Ming, and a film tradition from Zhang Yimou to Jia Zhangke. Hong Kong has its own line in Cantopop and the action and noir cinema of the 1980s and 1990s that the world still recognises. The traditional arts, calligraphy, ink painting, classical gardens, porcelain, are alive in the museums and in the hobby classes of the retired.

History

Before the empire

The earliest writing recognisably ancestral to modern Chinese appears on Shang dynasty oracle bones from around the 13th century BC, found along the middle Yellow River in Henan. The Shang ruled a small core, but their bronze ritual vessels and divination set the template that later dynasties expanded. The Zhou who followed, from roughly 1046 to 256 BC, held nominal power over a patchwork of competing states and produced most of China’s foundational thought: Confucius (551 to 479 BC) and his school of ritual and ethical government, Laozi and the Daoists, Mozi the universalist, and the Legalists who would win.

Qin and Han

In 221 BC the Qin king Ying Zheng finished off the last rival and proclaimed himself First Emperor. He standardised script, coinage, weights and axle widths, linked the older defensive walls into the ancestor of the Great Wall, and was buried east of his capital under the largest tomb mound in Chinese history, guarded by more than 8,000 terracotta soldiers, horses and chariots. The dynasty lasted fifteen years.

The Han (206 BC to AD 220) kept the Qin administration and softened its ideology, making Confucianism the state philosophy under Emperor Wu. They pushed the borders out to something like their modern shape, opened the Silk Road through Central Asia and ruled a population of around 60 million by the 2nd century AD. The majority ethnic group still calls itself Han.

Tang and Song

After three and a half centuries of division the Sui briefly reunited the country (581 to 618) and dug the Grand Canal linking the Yellow River and the Yangtze; the Tang (618 to 907) used that base to run the largest and richest empire on earth. Chang’an, on the site of modern Xi’an, held about a million people inside walls enclosing 84 km² and hosted Persian, Sogdian, Korean, Japanese, Arab and Jewish merchant communities. Buddhism peaked, China’s only ruling empress (Wu Zetian, r. 690 to 705) took the throne, and the poets of the age, Li Bai, Du Fu and Wang Wei, are still memorised at school. The An Lushan rebellion of 755 to 763 broke central control, and the dynasty limped on for another 150 years before fragmenting.

The Song, from 960, ruled a smaller territory and a more inventive one: woodblock printing went mass-market, paper money entered circulation, the magnetic compass guided ships, gunpowder weapons appeared and the civil service examination became the main route into government. Pushed south by the Jurchen in 1127, the court ran another century and a half from Hangzhou.

Yuan, Ming and Qing

The Mongols under Kublai Khan finished the Song in 1279 and ruled as the Yuan (1271 to 1368) from Khanbalik, the city that became Beijing: the first non-Han dynasty to rule the whole country. A peasant rebellion produced the Ming (1368 to 1644), whose Yongle Emperor moved the capital to Beijing, built the Forbidden City (begun 1406, occupied 1420) and the Temple of Heaven, and sent Zheng He’s fleets of more than 200 ships as far as East Africa. The Ming rebuilt the Great Wall in stone and brick; almost everything you walk on today is their work. Their tombs lie in a valley north of the capital, and the long boom they presided over ended in fiscal collapse and peasant rebellion in the 1640s.

The Manchus, from the north-east, took Beijing in 1644 and ruled as the Qing until 1912. Three long reigns (Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong) extended the empire to roughly its present borders, doubled the population and made China the world’s largest economy for most of the 18th century. The 19th century undid it: two Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860), the treaty that gave Hong Kong island to Britain, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864 that killed perhaps 20 million, and defeats by Japan in 1895 and the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900. The boy emperor Puyi abdicated in February 1912.

Republic and war

The Republic declared in 1912 under Sun Yat-sen fragmented at once into warlord fiefs. By the 1930s Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, based in Nanjing, were fighting the Communists (founded 1921 in Shanghai) on one front and Japan on the other.

The Japanese invasion of 1937 became the Second Sino-Japanese War, eight years fought on Chinese soil and merged into the Second World War after Pearl Harbor. The Nanjing Massacre of December 1937 still shapes relations with Japan. The Nationalist government retreated upriver to Chongqing, which was bombed for years and dug the shelters that are still in its cliffs, while the Communists ran a guerrilla war in the north. After Japan’s surrender in 1945 the civil war resumed, the Communists won, and on 1 October 1949 Mao declared the People’s Republic from Tiananmen Gate. Chiang withdrew to Taiwan with two million followers.

The People’s Republic

The first decade redistributed land, nationalised industry, allied with the Soviet Union and fought the United States to a draw in Korea. Mao’s two great campaigns then pulled the country off course: the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962), an attempt to industrialise through backyard furnaces and forced collectivisation, produced a famine that killed at least 30 million on most modern estimates, and the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976) closed schools, wrecked temples and historic sites at scale, and made political targets of tens of millions. Mao died in September 1976.

Xi Jinping has led the party since 2012, and a 2018 amendment removed presidential term limits. The current era is one of recentralised party authority, a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road programme abroad, hardened policy in Xinjiang and Tibet, and, since the National Security Law of 2020, a reshaped political system in Hong Kong.

Nature

China has sixty World Heritage Sites, cultural and natural together, second only to Italy, and in October 2021 it designated its first five national parks: Sanjiangyuan on the Tibetan plateau, the Giant Panda park across Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard park on the Russian border, Hainan Tropical Rainforest and the Wuyi Mountains, together more than 230,000 km².

The natural sites on this guide’s loop cluster in three types. Karst: the Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo, where cruises draw millions a year, and the South China Karst inscription of 2007 that covers parts of Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan and Chongqing. Mountain: Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong in northern Sichuan with their terraced turquoise lakes, Emei Shan and the Leshan Buddha, and the Hengduan ranges on the plateau edge in the west. Sacred peaks: Hua Shan in Shaanxi, 2,155 metres, with a cable car to the North Peak and the plank walk bolted to the cliff, and Emei in Sichuan, one of the four Buddhist mountains.

Wildlife is the panda first and everything else second. About 1,900 giant pandas live wild in six mountain ranges, mostly in Sichuan with smaller populations in Shaanxi and Gansu, and the species was moved from endangered to vulnerable in 2016 after decades of reserve-building; the Chengdu Research Base is where you will actually see one, and its celebrity animals draw hours-long queues. The Tibetan plateau has wild yak, Tibetan antelope, snow leopard and black-necked crane; the subtropical south-west has China’s last elephants and gibbons; the Li River still has cormorant fishermen, now mostly performing for the boats.

The rice terraces are the other landscape. Longsheng, north of Guilin, was cut into the hillsides some 650 years ago between 600 and 800 metres, and runs through the year from flooded mirrors in early June to green shoots, gold harvest and winter frost.

Hong Kong is the surprise. Country parks cover about 40 percent of the SAR, the MacLehose Trail runs 100 km along the spine of the New Territories, and Tai Mo Shan, the highest point, is 957 metres. A ridge walk above the South China Sea is forty minutes from a Central hotel lift, and the Big Buddha at Ngong Ping sits in the middle of Lantau’s hills.

Getting there

Almost everyone flies. The mainland gateways for this guide are Beijing Capital (PEK) and Beijing Daxing (PKX), Guangzhou Baiyun (CAN), Chengdu Tianfu (TFU) and Shenzhen Bao’an (SZX), with Xi’an, Chongqing and Guilin served by connections and a growing number of direct international routes. Air China, China Eastern and China Southern fly from most European and North American hubs; the Gulf carriers, Cathay Pacific via Hong Kong and the Southeast Asian airlines cover the rest. Chinese airlines can route over Russia and are often the cheapest and fastest option from Europe.

Hong Kong International on Lantau is one of the busiest airports on earth and the alternative front door: no mainland visa needed to land, an Airport Express train that reaches Central in 24 minutes every ten minutes for HK$120 on an Octopus card, and the West Kowloon high-speed terminus linking straight into the mainland network. Macao’s airport is small and useful for budget flights from Southeast Asia.

Arrival on the mainland means fingerprints, a customs declaration and a passport check that can take a while at peak hours; the Beijing airports and Guangzhou have dedicated lanes for the 240-hour transit. Airport rail links run into Beijing (both airports), Guangzhou, Chengdu and Shenzhen; taxis take the official rank only, and Didi works from the terminal once your payment app is live.

Overland, the crossings that work for foreigners are the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border (Lo Wu, Lok Ma Chau, Futian, Heung Yuen Wai), the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge by bus, and from Vietnam the Friendship Pass at Pingxiang in Guangxi, with through trains from Hanoi to Nanning. Land borders with Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Nepal, Laos and Myanmar open and close with the politics; the Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Manchurian trains from Moscow run weekly.

By sea, the Pearl River delta ferries between Hong Kong, Macao, Shenzhen and Zhuhai are frequent and fast, and the Hong Kong airport has its own ferry pier for passengers connecting to Macao without clearing Hong Kong immigration. Long-distance passenger sailings from Japan and Korea are a thin trickle, and cruise ships call at Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin.

Getting around

The high-speed network is the default. It reached 48,000 km at the end of 2024, more than the rest of the world put together, and every city in this guide is on it. Trains are lettered by speed: G trains run at up to 350 km/h on the dedicated trunk lines, D trains at 250 km/h, C trains on short intercity hops, and the older K and Z services are the conventional overnight trains. Beijing to Xi’an, Xi’an to Chengdu, Chengdu to Chongqing, Chongqing to Guilin and Guilin to Guangzhou or Shenzhen are each a few hours of sitting still, and Hong Kong joins at West Kowloon with direct trains to Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing.

Tickets are tied to your passport, go on sale about two weeks ahead, and are easiest to buy on Trip.com or the official 12306 app; there is nothing to print, and at the station you pass the gate by scanning the passport itself. Second class is comfortable and the sensible default, first class is roomier, business class is a lie-flat seat you will not need. Stations are airport-sized, security-screened and on the edge of town; arrive 45 minutes ahead, and expect the metro to take longer to the station than the train takes to the next city. Luggage goes on racks and there is no formal limit, but nobody helps you lift it.

Overnight sleepers still cover the long hauls and the plateau: soft sleeper is a lockable four-berth compartment, hard sleeper an open six-berth bay, and the newer high-speed sleepers on the Beijing-Hong Kong and Beijing-Shanghai routes are a comfortable middle. Flights fill the gaps the trains do not, the far west and any hop over 1,500 km; they are cheap, dense and often late. Long-distance buses are the fallback for the countryside and the only way into some of the karst villages.

The Yangtze cruise is transport as well as sightseeing. Boats leave Chongqing in the evening and reach Yichang a few days later through the three gorges, with shore excursions on the way, and the trains from Yichang connect to everywhere.

In cities, the metro. Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen all run large networks with English signage, and Hong Kong’s MTR is one of the busiest in the world. Gates take a QR code from Alipay or WeChat Pay, so once payment is set up there is nothing to buy. Taxis are metered and cheap but need the destination in Chinese characters; the Didi app, which has an English interface, is the safer way to hail one outside airport ranks, and it also unlocks the shared bikes that line every pavement. In Hong Kong an Octopus card does trams, ferries, buses, the MTR and the convenience store.

Driving yourself is not realistic on a short trip: International Driving Permits are not recognised on the mainland, and signage, tolls and parking all assume Chinese. Hire a car with a driver through your hotel or Trip.com for the Great Wall or the countryside; a day costs less than a rental would. In Hong Kong and Macao an IDP works, and almost nobody bothers because the public transport is that good.

Where to stay

Mainland hotels sort into three tiers: international chains (Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Shangri-La, IHG) for predictable Western standards; the big domestic chains (Jin Jiang, H World’s Hanting and Ji brands, BTG Homeinn, Atour) for solid mid-market rooms at a fraction of the price; and a long tail of local guesthouses. The catch that trips up foreign travellers is licensing. Not every hotel is registered to accept foreign guests, and budget places sometimes turn you away at the desk. Booking through Trip.com or Agoda filters for the ones that can take you, and the domestic chains have become steadily better at it since the visa-free rules brought more foreigners through.

Courtyard hotels in restored hutong houses are a Beijing speciality, with rooms around a central garden a few metres from a main road. Riverside guesthouses in Yangshuo and the Longsheng terraces of Guangxi are the rural equivalent, and the villages outside Yangshuo have the best of them. In Chengdu and Xi’an the old-town quarters have small hotels in converted houses. Hostels in the big cities usually have English-speaking desks and are the easiest way to meet other travellers.

Hong Kong and Macao run on different scales. Hong Kong rooms are small and expensive; the budget end is the guesthouse warren of Chungking Mansions on Nathan Road, completed in 1961, which holds more guesthouses under one roof than anywhere else in the city, with close to 2,000 rooms at some of the lowest rates in town. Macao splits between the Cotai casino resorts, which discount heavily midweek and are good value for what they are, and a handful of guesthouses and pousadas on the peninsula near the historic centre.

Check-in everywhere needs your passport and a deposit. Hotels register foreign guests with the police automatically; if you stay in a private flat you are meant to register yourself at the local station within 24 hours. Wi-Fi is universal and fast, and on the mainland it is behind the firewall like everything else. Hotel breakfasts are large and mostly Chinese, which is the right way round.

Visas & entry

The picture has changed completely since 2023, and it is worth checking the current list before assuming anything.

Visa-free entry, 30 days. Under a temporary regime that currently runs to 31 December 2026, citizens of most EU member states (the Czech Republic and Lithuania excepted), the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and several other countries can enter mainland China for up to 30 days without a visa, for tourism, business or family visits. Confirm your passport is on the list with the Chinese embassy site before booking; the list has grown in steps and can be extended or lapse.

240-hour transit. Citizens of 57 countries, including the United States, can transit for up to ten days without a visa if they enter and leave through designated ports and travel on to a third country or territory. The ports include the airports of Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Guilin, Nanning, Shenzhen and Xi’an, and Hong Kong or Macao count as the onward destination.

Everyone else applies for a tourist (L) visa through a Chinese Visa Application Service Centre in their country of residence, with a flight itinerary and hotel bookings; allow a couple of weeks. Overstaying any of the above is fined by the day and remembered.

Hong Kong and Macao are separate. Both SARs run their own immigration, independent of the mainland’s, and most Western and Commonwealth passports enter each of them visa-free for between one and six months; the region pages have the detail. Crossing from the mainland into either SAR counts as leaving China, so re-entering the mainland needs a fresh visa-free entry or a multiple-entry visa.

Carry your passport at all times. It is your train ticket, your hotel key, your museum ticket and your ID for a police check; a photocopy is not accepted at any of them.

Money & budget

Three currencies cover the trip.

Mainland China: renminbi (CNY), symbol ¥. The unit is the yuan, called kuai in speech, with ten jiao (mao) to the yuan. Notes run from 1 to 100 yuan. The rate has sat around 7 yuan to the US dollar for several years.

Hong Kong: Hong Kong dollar (HKD). Pegged to the US dollar in a band around 7.75 to 7.85 since 1983, and issued by three commercial banks plus the government, so note designs vary.

Macao: pataca (MOP). Pegged to the Hong Kong dollar at 1.03. Macao shops accept HKD at par; Hong Kong shops do not accept patacas, so spend them before you leave.

On the mainland, money is a phone. Alipay and WeChat Pay handle almost every purchase from a metro gate to a noodle stall, and both let foreign visitors link a Visa or Mastercard or preload a balance through Alipay’s Tour Pass, introduced in 2019. Set one up before you fly, with your passport and card to hand, and test it on a small purchase in the SARs or at the airport. Foreign credit cards work in international hotels, airline counters and upmarket shops and almost nowhere else. Cash still works, and a couple of hundred yuan in small notes is worth carrying for markets and the occasional taxi, but expect a look when you hand over a 100.

ATMs at Bank of China, ICBC and HSBC take foreign cards, with per-withdrawal limits of a few thousand yuan. In Hong Kong and Macao, cards and ATMs behave as they do anywhere in the developed world, and Octopus (Hong Kong) or a contactless card covers transport.

Costs are lower than Western Europe on the mainland and higher than it in Hong Kong. A bowl of noodles is a few yuan, a mid-range hotel room a few hundred, and the big sights 40 to 120 yuan each; the individual pages carry the current prices. Tipping is not done on the mainland and confuses people. In Hong Kong and Macao, round up taxis and leave ten percent where a service charge is not already on the bill.

Languages

“Chinese” is a family of languages that share a writing system. Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) is the official spoken language of the People’s Republic, based on the Beijing dialect, and is what school, television, government and the railway announcements use; around 80 percent of mainland residents speak it, more in the cities and the north, fewer in the rural south.

The other languages a traveller on this loop meets: Cantonese in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, with around 80 million speakers and its own film, pop and literary tradition; Sichuanese, technically a Mandarin dialect but distinct enough that northerners struggle in Chengdu and Chongqing; and Zhuang, the Tai language of the Guangxi autonomous region. The mainland writes in simplified characters, Hong Kong and Macao in traditional ones, and the two are different enough that a mainland visitor reads Hong Kong signs with a slight pause. China recognises 55 ethnic minorities, and Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Korean are all official in their own regions.

English is widely taught and unevenly spoken. International hotels, airline desks and big-museum ticket counters manage; small restaurants, shops, taxi drivers and station staff mostly do not. Camera translation apps handle menus and signs, and Pleco is the dictionary that works offline; Google Translate needs a VPN on the mainland. Have your hotel write its name and address in characters on a card for taxis. In Hong Kong and Macao, English is an official language and works everywhere tourists go, and Portuguese survives in Macao on the signs and in a handful of restaurants.

Essentials

1. Yes是的shì de
2. No不是bú shì
3. Please请qǐng
4. Thank you谢谢xièxie
5. You're welcome不客气bú kèqi
6. Sorry对不起duìbuqǐ
7. Hello你好nǐ hǎo
8. Goodbye再见zàijiàn
9. Good morning早上好zǎoshang hǎo
10. Good afternoon下午好xiàwǔ hǎo
11. My name is …我叫…wǒ jiào …
12. Do you speak English?你会说英语吗？nǐ huì shuō Yīngyǔ ma?
13. I don't speak Mandarin我不会说中文wǒ bú huì shuō Zhōngwén
14. I need a doctor我需要看医生wǒ xūyào kàn yīshēng

Out & about

1. The bill, please买单，谢谢mǎidān, xièxie
2. How much does this cost?这个多少钱？zhège duōshao qián?
3. Two of these, please这个要两个zhège yào liǎng ge
4. Do you accept cards?可以刷卡吗？kěyǐ shuākǎ ma?
5. Where is the bathroom?洗手间在哪里？xǐshǒujiān zài nǎlǐ?
6. What's the wifi password?Wi-Fi 密码是多少？Wi-Fi mìmǎ shì duōshao?
7. Today / tomorrow今天 / 明天jīntiān / míngtiān
8. A glass of water一杯水yì bēi shuǐ
9. A beer, please请来一瓶啤酒qǐng lái yì píng píjiǔ
10. Is breakfast included?包早餐吗？bāo zǎocān ma?
11. Could you take a photo?可以帮我拍张照吗？kěyǐ bāng wǒ pāi zhāng zhào ma?

Also available: Cantonese, Cantonese

Safety & health

Violent crime against visitors is rare on the mainland and rarer in Hong Kong and Macao, which rank among the safest cities anywhere. The realistic risks are the usual ones: pickpockets in stations and at crowded sights; the “tea ceremony” and “art student” scams in Beijing and Xi’an, where a friendly English speaker leads you to a private room and a four-figure bill; and unmetered taxis at airports and tourist sites. Say no to the tea, and take the official rank. Lost property tends to come back, and a phone left in a taxi is more likely to be returned than stolen.

Health risks are food, water and air. Tap water is not for drinking anywhere, including the SARs. Street food is fine when it is busy and cooked in front of you. Air quality in the northern cities is poor from November to March, with PM2.5 readings that can run to many times the WHO guideline; a KN95 mask is cheap insurance, and air-quality apps work without a VPN. Pharmacies are everywhere and sell most things over the counter, but bring your own prescription medicines with the paperwork. Hospitals in the big cities have international wings that take insurance; travel insurance that covers evacuation is worth having for the plateau.

Roads are the everyday danger. Pedestrian crossings are advisory, right turns on red are normal and scooters use the pavement, silently, because most of them are electric. Look both ways twice. Altitude is the other one: the roads west from Sichuan climb above 3,000 metres quickly, so ascend gradually and carry the usual medication.

Politics is best left out of conversations and off Chinese platforms: Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, 1989, the Hong Kong protests and the leadership personally. Photographing military or government buildings gets attention, and drones need registration. None of this touches ordinary tourism, but the line is real, and the Hong Kong of 2026 is not the Hong Kong of 2015 on this point.

Practical info

The firewall and VPNs. Mainland China blocks Google (search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, X, Wikipedia and most Western news sites. A VPN installed and tested before arrival is close to essential; downloading one inside the country is hard because the app stores filter them. Hong Kong and Macao have an open internet and are where to fix a broken VPN. International roaming on a foreign SIM bypasses the firewall as a side effect; a local SIM, which needs passport registration, does not. An eSIM bought abroad before the trip is the simplest fix for a phone.

Apps to install before you go. Alipay or WeChat (payments, transport, ordering), Didi (taxis), Trip.com (trains, hotels, sight tickets), Amap or Baidu Maps (Google Maps is blocked and its China data is poor), Pleco (dictionary), and a translation app with a camera. Set up the payment app with your passport and card at home; the verification can take a day. WeChat is also how Chinese contacts will want to reach you.

Bookings and passports. Almost every major sight now sells timed tickets online in advance, under your passport number, and several (the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army, the National Museum) do not sell at the gate at all. Book the big ones the day they open and carry the physical passport to the turnstile; the individual pages on this site say how far ahead each one opens.

Time zone. UTC+8 everywhere, no daylight saving, one zone for the whole country.

Electricity. 220 V, 50 Hz in all three jurisdictions. Mainland sockets take flat two-pin (Type A) and angled three-pin (Type I) plugs, often in one outlet; Hong Kong and Macao use the British three-pin (Type G). A universal adapter covers the lot.

Toilets. Public toilets are everywhere in cities and metro stations, usually squat, usually without paper. Carry tissues. Hotels, malls and international chains are Western-style.

Opening hours. Shops and malls run late, typically 10:00 to 22:00, seven days. Museums close on Mondays almost without exception. Banks keep office hours. Restaurants serve lunch from about 11:00 and dinner from about 17:30, and the kitchens in small places close early by European standards.

Emergency numbers. 110 for police, 120 for an ambulance and 119 for fire on the mainland; 999 for all three in Hong Kong and Macao.