There is a version of a China trip that never goes near Beijing or Shanghai, involves no domestic flights, and covers about seven hundred kilometres of some of the most difficult railway ever built.
Three cities: Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing. Ten days. Two train legs, both of them short.
It is a poor first trip and an excellent second one, and it is worth being clear about why.
Why not first
A first trip to China is doing the things that made you want to come — the Wall, the Forbidden City, probably Shanghai’s waterfront. Skipping them to see three inland cities is a decision you make once you have already been.
Xi’an is the exception, which is why it anchors this route: the Terracotta Army is a first-trip sight that happens to sit in the west.
The shape
| Base | Nights | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Xi’an | 3 | Terracotta Army, the walls, the Muslim Quarter |
| Chengdu | 4 | Pandas, Leshan, and the slow day |
| Chongqing | 3 | The vertical city, and the Yangtze |
The legs
-
1
Xi’an — three nights
Fly in here. The Terracotta Army is out at Lintong and takes half a day properly; the city walls are cyclable; the Muslim Quarter is the best street food on the route and the reason to give this city three nights rather than two. Our 3-day Xi’an itinerary covers the stop order in full, and the 4-day version adds a Huashan day trip if there’s room for it.
Xi’an is also where the Silk Road started, which gives the museums here a coherence that most Chinese city museums lack.
- Xi’an to Chengdu — 3 h 07 on the fastest service, 127 km of tunnel
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2
Chengdu — four nights
The leg itself is part of the trip. The line crosses the Qinling, the physical divide between northern and southern China, and it did not exist before December 2017 — this journey used to take sixteen hours. The engineering is worth reading about before you ride it.
Four nights in Chengdu, following the four-day plan: the panda base, Leshan, a whole morning in a teahouse doing nothing, and Sanxingdui.
This is the centre of the route and the reason to take it. Chengdu is the one major Chinese city where the pace is the attraction.
- Chengdu to Chongqing — from about 1 h by G-train
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3
Chongqing — three nights
About an hour away on the fastest nonstop service, and completely unlike Chengdu, which is the point of putting them together — see the full train breakdown for fares and the more realistic 1.5–2 hour range on a standard express. Chongqing is built on hills at the confluence of two rivers, stacked vertically to a degree that makes the ground floor of one building the eighth floor of another. It is the city the short-video apps made famous. Our Chongqing hub covers the full nine-guide destination, from the confluence to the Dazu Rock Carvings.
It is also the departure point for Yangtze cruises, if you want to extend. And it has an airport with better long-haul options than it had five years ago.
Chengdu and Chongqing are both Sichuan hotpot cities and they do not agree about it. Chongqing’s is oilier and considerably hotter; Chengdu’s is more aromatic. Locals in each will tell you the other is wrong. Trying both in one trip is the cheapest form of research available here — our Chengdu food guide covers how ordering works.
What this route gives you that the classic one does not
- No flights. Two train legs, both under three and a half hours, both from city-centre stations.
- Fewer bases. Three in ten days means two travel days, not four. This is the least tiring ten-day route we know of in China.
- Cheap entry fees. Chengdu’s four days come to about CNY 277 per adult. There is no CNY 593 scenic-area ticket anywhere on this route.
- A cuisine, properly. Ten days inside Sichuan cooking is enough to stop reading it as “spicy” and start telling the styles apart.
What it does not have
- Landscape. This is a cities-and-food route. If you want karst towers or sandstone pillars, take the southern route instead.
- An easy exit. You fly home from Chongqing or backtrack. There is no equivalent of the Guangzhou–Hong Kong door on this side of the country.
- Beijing. Worth stating plainly. If you have not seen the Wall, this is not the trip to take.
Extending it
Two directions work. West from Chengdu takes you toward Jiuzhaigou and eventually the Tibetan plateau, which is a different kind of trip and, for Tibet proper, a permit process rather than a booking. East from Chongqing puts you on the Yangtze toward the Three Gorges, which costs three to four days and locks your dates.
The simpler extension is to fly Chengdu to Zhangjiajie and pick up the landscape country — that is how the three-week route joins the two halves of this site together.
Public traveller reports through 2026 consistently describe Chengdu and Chongqing as more different than the short journey between them suggests, and repeatedly record the Xi’an to Chengdu train as a highlight in itself rather than a transfer.
Summarised from public traveller discussion, not from a visit. We have not travelled this route ourselves — see how we check.