Find your next answer
Search China Travel Kit.
12 suggestions to get you started
city · 北京 · North China
Beijing
The capital is vast, formal and surprisingly gentle once you step off the ring roads. Give it four days: one for the palaces, one for the Wall, two for wandering.
city · 成都 · Southwest China
Chengdu
Chengdu is the unhurried capital of China. People sit in teahouses for whole afternoons, dinner takes three hours, and nobody minds. Three days in the city, then the mountains.
city · 重庆 · Southwest China
Chongqing
Chongqing stacks itself up the hillsides where the Yangtze meets the Jialing. It is disorienting, dramatic and delicious. Two days, and eat hot pot on the first night.
city · 大理 · Southwest China
Dali
Dali sits between Erhai Lake and the Cangshan range, and people who came for two days stay for two weeks. Cycle the lake, walk the mountain, do very little.
city · 敦煌 · Northwest China
Dunhuang
Dunhuang is a small town at the end of the Hexi Corridor, with the Mogao Caves on one side and the singing dunes on the other. It is far from everywhere and worth the journey.
city · 桂林 · South China
Guilin
The landscape on the twenty-yuan note. Use Guilin city as the gateway, drift down the river, and stay in the countryside around Yangshuo.
city · 杭州 · East China
Hangzhou
Hangzhou is the lake and the hills around it. Two days lets you walk the lake, cycle to the tea villages and drink a lot of Longjing.
city · 上海 · East China
Shanghai
Shanghai is the easy entry point: signage in English, a metro that goes everywhere, and neighbourhoods built for walking. Three days is enough for the city; add Suzhou or Hangzhou as day trips.
city · 西安 · Northwest China
Xi'an
The old capital of thirteen dynasties has one world-famous sight and a lot of quieter ones. Two full days covers it; a third lets you slow down.
city · 郑州 · Central China
Zhengzhou
Most visitors change trains in Zhengzhou without leaving the station. Stay a day and you get one of the country's best provincial museums, 3,600-year-old earth walls running through the middle of town, and the Songshan monuments ninety minutes south-west.
city · 苏州 · East China
Suzhou
Suzhou's gardens are small, perfect and best seen one or two at a time. Stay a night in the old town rather than day-tripping, and see them at opening before the groups.
city · 平遥 · North China
Pingyao
Pingyao is the best-preserved walled town in China, a grid of grey courtyards inside a six-kilometre wall. Sleep inside the walls and the evenings are yours.