Two weeks in China means roughly eleven usable days once you subtract arrival, departure and the fact that a travel day between cities is not a sightseeing day.
Eleven days holds three or four bases. Attempting six is the most common way to come home tired and remember airports. The three routes below each commit to four bases and are built around high-speed rail, which is faster than flying on most of these legs once you count airport time.
Route 1 — The classic: Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Shanghai
For: a first trip that wants the headline sights and a change of pace in the middle.
| Base | Nights | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Beijing | 4 | Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, hutongs, the Great Wall |
| Xi’an | 2 | Terracotta Army, city wall, Muslim Quarter |
| Chengdu | 3 | Panda base, Leshan, teahouses |
| Shanghai | 3 | The Bund, the concessions, Pudong, food |
The legs: Beijing → Xi’an and Xi’an → Chengdu are both high-speed rail; Chengdu → Xi’an runs in a little over three hours on the fastest service. Chengdu → Shanghai is long enough that flying wins.
This is the strongest first-trip route. Chengdu in the middle is what stops it becoming a fortnight of monuments.
Route 2 — The landscape route: Shanghai, Zhangjiajie, Guilin, Hong Kong
For: a second trip, or a first trip by someone who does not care much about imperial history.
| Base | Nights | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Shanghai | 3 | Arrival, the city, a water town day |
| Zhangjiajie | 3 | Wulingyuan pillars, Tianmen Mountain |
| Guilin & Yangshuo | 4 | Li River cruise, cycling the Yulong valley |
| Hong Kong | 3 | A completely different city, and an easy exit |
The legs: Shanghai → Zhangjiajie and Zhangjiajie → Guilin are both easiest by air. Guilin → Hong Kong runs on high-speed rail.
The visa note: Hong Kong is a separate region for immigration purposes. That is inconvenient if you are counting days on a mainland entry — and useful if you are on the 240-hour transit scheme, which requires onward travel to a third country or region.
Zhangjiajie is the most expensive destination in China for entry fees — roughly CNY 580–610 per adult for three days before food, transport or accommodation. Guilin, by contrast, is inexpensive. Do not average them in your head. We break this route down leg by leg in the southern China route.
Route 3 — The western route: Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Yunnan
For: travellers who want China to stop looking like the brochure by the second week.
| Base | Nights | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Beijing | 3 | The essentials, compressed |
| Xi’an | 2 | Terracotta Army, city wall |
| Chengdu | 3 | Pandas, food, the gateway west |
| Yunnan — Lijiang and Shangri-La | 4 | Old towns, mountains, minority cultures |
The legs: rail as far as Chengdu, then fly into Yunnan. Note the altitude: Shangri-La sits high enough that it should not be your first stop after a long-haul flight.
Choosing between them
| Route 1 · Classic | Route 2 · Landscape | Route 3 · Western | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | First trip | Second trip, or scenery-first | Travellers wanting depth |
| Mostly by | Rail | Air | Rail, then air |
| Entry-fee cost | Moderate | High (Zhangjiajie) | Moderate |
| Physical demand | Low | Moderate — a lot of steps | Moderate — altitude |
Rules that apply to all three
- Book rail as soon as the window opens. Chinese rail tickets are name-registered to your passport and popular routes sell out.
- Count travel days honestly. A four-hour train plus two station transfers is a day.
- Check the holiday calendar first. Spring Festival and 1–7 October will overwhelm any of these routes. See best time to visit China.
- Reserve timed-entry attractions early. The Chengdu panda base opens 14 days ahead and sells nothing at the gate; the pattern is spreading to other sites.
- Check your entry route. If you are relying on visa-free transit rather than a visa, the route itself has to comply — see visa-free entry and 240-hour transit.
Booking the rail legs
Chinese rail tickets do not go on sale months ahead the way European ones do. The booking window opens 15 days before departure, so on a two-week trip you end up booking most of your legs after you land, not before you fly. The exception is timed-entry sites like the Chengdu panda base, which open their own window separately and sell out first.
You need the physical passport to buy a ticket and to get through a station gate, and the name on the booking has to match it exactly. The 12306 English app is the railway’s own platform and takes foreign passports directly; resellers charge extra for the same seat. Berth and seat assignment is usually automatic rather than chosen, so if a lower bunk or a window seat matters to you, book the moment the window opens rather than waiting.
Two habits are worth building before the first leg. Booking sites sort by price by default, and a slower K-class train can be cheaper and list above a G-class high-speed service that gets there in half the time — sort by duration, not price. And get to a big station 40 minutes early: the ID check and the walk to the platform take longer than the ticket suggests, and the gates close before the train does. The letters, the bunk classes, and when a sleeper beats a flight are covered in full in our guide to long-distance trains in China.
China itinerary 2 weeks: what it actually costs
A China itinerary for two weeks is cheap on food, transport and hotels, and expensive in one specific place: entry fees. That is the line that catches people off guard, and it varies far more by destination than by how long you stay.
| Destination | Days | Entry fees |
|---|---|---|
| Chengdu | 4 | About CNY 277 |
| Zhangjiajie | 3 | CNY 593 |
Checked 14 Aug 2026 Figures from this site’s own destination guides; Zhangjiajie is from the official 2026 fee schedule. Full breakdown in what a China trip actually costs.
The pattern behind those numbers: cities are close to free and scenic parks are not. A day in Chengdu costs almost nothing once you are past the flight and the hotel; a day in Zhangjiajie costs CNY 200 before you have eaten, which is why Route 2’s budget warning above singles it out. Route 1 and Route 3 both avoid that cost, because Beijing, Xi’an and Chengdu do not charge anything close to it. For how these three routes stack up against the rest of the country on the same basis, see where to go on a first, second or third trip.
If keeping the budget down matters more than the scenery does, a ten-day route through Xi’an, Chengdu and Chongqing with no flights at all avoids Zhangjiajie’s ticket price entirely. It is a different trip to any of the three above, but the same reasoning applies.
Two weeks in China: quick answers
Is two weeks enough for China?
Enough for three or four bases, not six. Two weeks holds around eleven usable days once arrival, departure and travel days are subtracted, which fits one classic route or one landscape route — not both. That is why each route above sticks to four bases. If fourteen days feels tight once you are into the planning, the three-week route is built to add a fifth or sixth base without the same trade-offs.
Can you do Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai in 2 weeks?
Yes, with days to spare. That is a lighter itinerary than any of the three routes above: Route 1 fits those three cities plus Chengdu into the same fourteen days. Dropping Chengdu leaves room for a slower pace, or for a different fourth stop.
Do you need a visa for two weeks in China?
Depends on your passport. Around fifty nationalities get unilateral visa-free entry for up to 30 days, no onward ticket required, which covers a two-week trip with room to spare. The 240-hour transit scheme is different: it caps out at 10 days and requires a confirmed ticket onward to a third country, so it does not stretch to a full fortnight on its own. If neither applies to you, the standard route is a tourist visa.