China Discovery Guide

China is not a destination so much as a subcontinent, and the practical consequence is that no two trips here resemble each other. It holds fifty-nine UNESCO World Heritage sites, the largest high-speed rail network in the world, and a continuous civilisation with a written record going back three thousand years.

The set pieces deserve their reputation. The Great Wall runs for thousands of kilometres and can be walked on restored sections or on crumbling ones with nobody else there. The Terracotta Army at Xi’an is eight thousand individually modelled figures. The Forbidden City in Beijing held twenty-four emperors.

What surprises most visitors is the variety beyond them: the karst rivers of Guangxi, the Tibetan plateau in western Sichuan, the rice terraces of Yunnan, the Silk Road oases of Gansu, and eight distinct regional cuisines that differ from one another as much as European national ones do.

The first trip

Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai, linked by high-speed rail — the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, the Terracotta Army and the city walls, and the Bund and the water towns. Ten days to two weeks, and everything is straightforward.

If you want landscape

Guilin and Yangshuo for the karst towers along the Li river; Zhangjiajie for the sandstone pillars; Huangshan for granite peaks above a sea of cloud; and the Yuanyang rice terraces in Yunnan, carved by the Hani over a thousand years.

If you want the Silk Road

West through Gansu: Dunhuang’s Mogao Caves, with the largest body of Buddhist art anywhere painted across a thousand years; the fort at Jiayuguan where the Ming wall ends in the desert; and the Zhangye Danxia hills striped in mineral colours.

If you want something different again

Western Sichuan for the Tibetan plateau and the monasteries of Kham; Yunnan for Dali, Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge; and Fujian for the tulou, vast circular earthen clan houses that are UNESCO-listed.

China is a civilisation-state with a continuous written record of three millennia, and a society that has changed faster in the last forty years than almost any in history. Both facts operate at once.

The written language as glue

Spoken Chinese comprises languages that are mutually unintelligible — Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu — held together by a shared writing system. This is why the script carries political as well as cultural weight, and why the mainland’s simplified characters and Taiwan’s traditional ones are a live distinction.

Guanxi and face

Relationships and reciprocal obligation structure business and social life, and preserving the dignity of the other party matters more than being right. Public anger loses the person expressing it standing. Direct refusal is avoided; a maybe or a change of subject frequently means no.

Family and the meal

Meals are shared from communal dishes and ordered for the table, the host pays and being allowed to split a bill is unusual. Eating is the primary social activity, and refusing food outright is awkward.

Scale as a habit of mind

The country routinely thinks in terms most places cannot: forty thousand kilometres of high-speed rail built since 2008, cities of ten million nobody outside China has heard of, and a domestic travel season that moves hundreds of millions of people in a fortnight.

• Beijing
• Gansu
• Jiangsu
• Shandong
• Shannxi
• Sichuan
• Yunnan

Chinese domestic tourism dwarfs the foreign kind, and the pressure points are severe at predictable times. The Golden Week holidays in early October and around Lunar New Year move hundreds of millions of people at once; every famous site is at capacity and transport is fully booked. Avoiding those two weeks is the single most effective decision you can make.

Book restored Great Wall sections at Mutianyu or Jinshanling rather than Badaling, which absorbs the coach traffic. At Zhangjiajie, Jiuzhaigou and the other big natural sites, timed-entry systems exist and are worth using.

In Tibetan, Uyghur and other minority areas, be conscious that tourism is politically freighted. Buy from the people who made the work, use local guides where permitted, and do not photograph people, religious practice or security infrastructure without care.

Refuse the plastic. Refill stations are common — most hotels, stations and trains provide boiled water — and carrying a flask is normal Chinese practice rather than an eccentricity.

April, May, September and October are the best months across most of the country: mild, drier, and clearer than the summer haze. Autumn in the north is particularly good.

June to August is hot and humid across the east and south, with the monsoon bringing heavy rain and occasional typhoons on the coast. The far west and the Tibetan plateau are at their best then, since they are impassable in winter.

November to March is cold and dry in the north — Beijing well below freezing, Harbin far colder, with an ice festival built on it — and mild in the far south. Air quality in northern cities is generally worst in winter.

Avoid two periods absolutely. Lunar New Year, in late January or February, produces the largest annual human migration on earth and shuts a great deal for a week. National Day Golden Week, the first week of October, fills every site and train in the country.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the country

China is inexpensive for food and transport and mid-priced for accommodation. The costs that surprise people are site entry fees and internal flights.