Most China guides open with a list of places. That is the wrong end to start from, because the places are not what people get wrong.
What people get wrong is structural: they book eight cities into twelve days, they arrive on a visa that does not permit what they intend to do, and they discover on day one that their bank card is useless. None of that is fixed by knowing which temple to see.
So this is the other kind of guide. Six decisions, in the order you have to make them.
1. How you are getting in
China now has two separate visa-free routes and they are routinely confused, including by travel agents.
One is unilateral visa-free entry for around fifty nationalities, for stays of up to thirty days. The other is visa-free transit of up to 240 hours for a longer list of countries, which requires an onward ticket to a third country and restricts where you may travel.
They are not interchangeable, and the transit scheme in particular catches people out — the onward-ticket rule is enforced at check-in, not on arrival. We have set out which applies to whom in the visa-free guide.
Crossing to either ends your mainland stay. On a single-entry visa or a transit scheme you cannot simply come back. Plan them as the end of the trip, not the middle.
2. When
China spans tropical islands and Siberian winters, so “the best time” is a question about where, not when. What does apply everywhere is the holiday calendar, and there are two weeks a year to plan around: the Spring Festival period, and the first week of October.
During those weeks the whole country travels at once. Tickets vanish, sites hit capacity, and prices move. Our month-by-month guide covers the regional detail; the calendar advice is simpler — check whether your dates overlap those two weeks before you book flights.
3. How long, and how many bases
This is the decision that separates good China trips from exhausting ones.
| Days | Bases | What fits |
|---|---|---|
| 7 – 9 | 2 | Beijing and Shanghai, or Beijing and Xi’an |
| 10 – 14 | 4 | A classic route, or a landscape route — not both |
| 15 – 21 | 6 | Classics plus the karst country |
| Under 7 | 1 | One city. Genuinely. |
The arithmetic that people skip: a travel day between bases is a lost day even when the train is fast, because you check out, you cross a city, you sit for four hours, you check in, and it is dark. Four bases in ten days means four of those.
The routes are worked out in full in two weeks in China and three weeks in China.
4. How you move
Rail, almost always. Chinese railway stations sit on metro lines and Chinese airports do not, domestic flights are chronically delayed, and the high-speed network reaches everywhere a first trip goes.
Three rules that matter more than the rest:
- Tickets open 15 days before departure, not months. This is the biggest single difference from planning European rail.
- The letter in front of the train number is the service class. A G and a K on the same route can differ by twelve hours. The letters and the sleeper classes are explained here.
- You need the physical passport to buy a ticket and to enter any station.
Fly only where the rail does not work — Chengdu to Zhangjiajie is the standard example on a landscape route.
5. What it costs
China is cheaper than western Europe on food, transport and hotels, and more expensive than people expect on entrance fees. The fees are the line item that surprises.
| Destination | Tickets |
|---|---|
| Chengdu, four days | About CNY 277 |
| Zhangjiajie, three days | CNY 593 |
| Guilin and Yangshuo, two days | About CNY 600 with the evening show |
Checked 14 Aug 2026 Figures compiled from our own destination guides, each of which carries its own sources and check date. Zhangjiajie is from the official 2026 fee schedule.
The pattern is worth internalising: cities are cheap and scenic areas are not. A day in Chengdu costs almost nothing; a day in Zhangjiajie costs CNY 200 before you have eaten.
6. The phone problem
This is the one that ruins first days, and it is not really about money.
Daily life in China runs through two apps, and both assume you have a Chinese phone number. Foreign cards now work in the major payment apps, but the setup is fiddlier than the marketing suggests and it is much easier done before you fly than in an airport queue.
We deliberately do not maintain a running guide to this. The rules change every few months, and a page of stale instructions about payment apps is worse than no page — it is the kind of advice that fails at the worst moment. What we will say is: sort it before departure, and do not assume your card works at a ticket gate.
The related worries — crime, scams, traffic — are covered honestly in is China safe for tourists. The short answer is that street crime is not the thing to think about.
Where to go, once the six are decided
Now the places matter. Best places to travel in China ranks destinations by which trip they belong on — first, second or third — and how many days each actually needs.
This site is built destination by destination rather than by topic, which is a deliberate choice: the useful facts about a place are its opening times, its fares and its transfers, and those only exist at destination level. Our three worked-out destinations are Chengdu, Zhangjiajie and Guilin and Yangshuo, each covered in nine guides.
Nobody at this desk has travelled these routes. Every figure here comes from an operator, an official schedule or a scenic area’s own published fees, and carries the date we checked it. Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement rather than the tidier number. That method is set out on how we check.