China travel guide: Everything you need to know

This Asian super-power could take a lifetime – or several – to explore. Here’s our guide to help plan your next trip

The forbidden city in Beijing (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

China is a giddy fusion of ultra-modern and ancient. Bullet trains whizz between Singapore-new cities where skyscrapers glistening with neon tower over Athens-old historical centres. Shanghai shimmers over the steaming Huangpo river. Old Xi’an at the end of the Silk Road huddles beneath the spires of the new metropolis, wooden mosques, medieval market-alleys and temples hidden behind massive, gated medieval walls. Vast Beijing sprawls between the Great Wall around the labyrinthine Imperial Forbidden City and the towers of the Temple of Heaven. Surrounding them all and dozens besides is the Chinese countryside – where misty mountain-tops, rhododendron rainforests and deserts of billowing dunes hide relics older than Stonehenge, butterfly-quiet monasteries and caves of Cyclopean stone Buddhas.

Travel restrictions and entry requirements

Direct flights between the UK and mainland China have resumed. But the country has a zero tolerance Covid policy and visas are not currently being issued to general tourists. Travellers are required to quarantine for a minimum of 10 days on arrival. Testing is frequent, random and compulsory and you will be asked to scan in QR codes to show your travel history. Positive checks result in immediate quarantine under which may involve separation from fellow travellers and family members. There are some restrictions of movement within the country – with some provinces requiring 14-day quarantine on arrival from areas where Covid is present. Restrictions are expected to ease in 2023.

Best time to go

China is larger than the US and climate varies enormously. While any month is a good month somewhere, spring and autumn are generally best, with November offering the perfect combination of crisp, dry days and lighter tourist crowds. Winter in the north can be bitterly cold, but balmy in Shanghai and Yunnan. Summer throughout southern and central China is hot and sticky, with temperatures reaching the high thirties in the western lowlands. Spring is the best time to visit the mountains, when the wildflowers are in bloom. April is the rainy season in the south and centre.

Top regions and cities

Beijing

Beijing doesn’t see itself as China’s capital. It is a global city, reclaiming its rightful place at the centre of the world. After all, for much of the last millennium this was Earth’s biggest metropolis, and the nexus around which global trade circulated. It’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer magnitude of the modern city and the antiquity of the old – the steel and glass endlessness, the teeming 21 million, packed into traffic jams and subway trains. Hidden within the hectic whirl are hulking 8,000-room imperial palaces of the Forbidden City, the imposing majesty of the Ming Dynasty Temple of Heaven and the bleak, haunting the expanse of Tiananmen square. You could spend a week in Beijing without exhausting the markets, museums, galleries and skybar views. And there’s so much nearby – from the Imperial Ming tombs on Tianshou Mountain to the best bit of the Great Wall in Simatai, an hour and a half’s drive north.

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Xi’an

Few places on Earth are more ancient than Xi’an – whose pagodas, mosques and serrated skyscrapers’ glitter marked the end of the Silk Road, at the foot of the Qinling Mountains across the desert from Mongolia. There have been people here since Lantian Man hunted 12ft elephants in the prehistoric grasslands. The Zhou Dynasty formed here in the 11th Century BC. And in the 3rd Century BC, Qin Shi Huang declared himself China’s first Emperor – ruling with terror and going to his grave with a giant terracotta army, still preserved in a museum on Mount Li.

Xi’an is where the great sage Xuanzang began and ended his journey to the west – immortalised in the Monkey legend – to retrieve the sacred sutras of Buddhism from India. The relics of this glorious past are everywhere in the shadow of a 5G present: the towering Ming Dynasty walls, the massive hip-and-gable pagoda roofs of the Bell and Drum Towers, the maze of streets in the old centre with their thronging markets and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. And there are those glorious pockets of peace – the fragrant gardens of the 8^th Century Great Mosque, and the meditative silence of Xuanzang’s 1,300-year-old Wild Goose Pagoda.

Guilin

Chinese gondolas and plunging limestone mountains, buffaloes pulling carts over steep-arched stone bridges, fishermen with cormorants and cast nets… Guilin has landscapes straight out of a Chinese painting. You can drift through sedately on a bamboo raft cruise down the Li or Yulong rivers. Or hike along the riverbanks, to the summit of Kitten Mountain for spectacular views. There are caves too, including the stalactite-dripping Reed Flute Cavern. And don’t miss the 650-year-old Longshen Rice Terraces, 100km north of Guilin City, which drop like green dragon’s scales to a distant horizon, through steep valleys and over rugged ridges.

Yunnan

China’s Southwestern province is where the country gets tropical – with rainforests running along the borders with Vietnam and Laos and teak woodlands rising up the steep valleys of the rushing Mekong river. The views are jaw-dropping. In the north, around the medieval wooden Silk-weaving town of Lijiang, the Himalayas rise snowy above lakes dotted with Qing Dynasty pagodas to the high peaks of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains. Just north of Lijiang, the tiny hamlets of the brightly dressed Nakhi indigenous people cling to the steep hills around the 3,000m-deep Tiger Leaping Gorge. And in the south, along the Dulong River and in the Xishuangbanna Tropical Rainforest National Park, mist rises from thick jungle dripping with waterfalls. Tigers still hunt here, for chevrotain deer as small as a rabbit and gaur bison, while gibbons whoop in the trees.

Shanghai

Nowhere is China’s economic miracle more obvious than the country’s greatest mega city. Building-high digital murals flash and shimmer from the steel and glass spires. Maglev trains travelling at nearly 300 miles per hour whisk visitors from the airport to the sparkling new business district of Pudong, which until the 1990s was little more than a swamp on the banks of the Huangpu River. Now it’s home to the 632 metre-high Shanghai Tower and the Oriental Pearl, looking like a giant Tesla Tower topped with a needle. It’s all best seen from the Bund, once the riverfront of a European trading city established at battleship gunpoint by Britain, the US and France after the Opium Wars. And in the endless sprawl inland behind the river are magnificent museums and galleries and the gold stupas and gabled pagodas of Jing’an – the Temple of Peace and Tranquility, crouching next to the rushing West Nanjing road, lost in skyscrapers and haze.

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Best under-the-radar destinations

Hunan

The landscapes of Wulingyaun in Central China’s Hunan province are other-worldly, which is why perhaps James Cameron used them for his Eden-like paradise in Avatar: some 3,000 quartzite pillars shrouded with pines rise up to a kilometre high over the rushing Zhangjiajie River. Black bears, Chinese water deer and Asian Wild Dogs wander in between through dense forest. You’ll need to hike to see the animals, but the pillars are easy to see. There’s even a lift – the world’s tallest – to whisk you from the riverbank to the best viewpoint, just outside Zhangjiajie City.

Nanjing and Yixing

It’s a puzzle why so few tourists make it to Jiangsu province; Nanjing the provincial capital is one of China’s four great imperial cities. And it’s a beauty: it’s monumental ancient walls, royal palaces, porcelain pagodas and Ming mausoleums are mirrored in the Yangtse river. Wandering the old stone city, with its narrow alleys and traditional tea shops, is a delight. There’s a lively restaurant and bar scene, a string of superb museums and plenty to see nearby. Top of the day-trip list Yixing – a 45-minute ride away by bullet train. The teapot was invented here, over a thousand years ago, crafted from Zisha purple clay. Today they are exquisitely decorated, collectible works of art crafted in little shops strung along ancient canals. In 2013, an antique Yixing engraved teapot made by master ceramicist Gu Jingzhou auctioned for $2m in Beijing.

Denfeng and Shaolin

You may not have heard of gorgeous Denfeng, but this little city set in rolling mountains was once known as “the Centre of Heaven and Earth”. It’s sprinkled with astonishing temples and monuments – the 3,000-year-old Goacheng Astronomical Observatory, the Huishan pagoda set in hills trilling with birdsong and Shaolin, a monastic complex perched on a mountain ridge and surrounded by a forest of stone pagodas where Kung Fu and Zen Buddhism were born. You can visit and watch the daily drills, or stay a while and learn martial arts and meditation.

Best things to do

See pandas in Chengdu

Finding giant pandas in the wild is a near impossibility. Even park rangers in the reserves dotting the mountain bamboo forests of Western China rarely see them. But it’s easy to hike through their habitat in Wolong Nature Reserve (three hours north of Chengdu City) and then see the animals up close at the Wolong Panda Center, where you can volunteer to feed the bears or clean out one of their enclosures (if you’ve the stomach for it).

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Walk the Great Wall

China’s Great Wall boggles the mind: allowing for overlapping sections, it extends for a distance equivalent to half the circumference of the Earth. So you can’t walk it all. Most visitors opt for the beautifully restored section at Mutianyu, 45km north of Beijing. For a longer hike, go further north to Jinshanling (two hours’ drive from Beijing) and day walk the section from here to Simatai through semi-wild, rugged country.

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Wander the gardens of Suzhou

For over a thousand years, classical Chinese gardens – with their carefully curated, semi-wild landscapes dotted with pavilions and naturally sculpted rocks – were a place of retreat and contemplation for scholars. Many were lost in the Cultural Revolution but a handful of the most exquisite, dating from the Song and Ming dynasties, are preserved in Suzhou City in Jiangsu province. Wandering through the round gates is like entering a living Willow Pattern, with birds singing in the pines and little bridges spanning tinkling streams. And Suzhou City – with its 1,000-year-old leaning pagodas, canals and wooden bridges – makes the gardens an elegant overnight stop from nearby Nanjing.

Contemplate the Buddha in Luoyang

China has four ancient capitals, considered the cradles of the country’s culture: Beijing, Xi’an, Nanjing and, probably the least visited, Luoyang. It’s a fascinating place, littered with ancient monuments – Neolithic settlements, 800-year-old astronomical observatories and a string of painted tombs. But the must-see attraction is the Longmen Grottoes: caves crammed with nearly 100,000 effigies of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas, some as small as a thumb, others as big as a bus.

Getting around

China has an extensive aviation and high-speed rail network connecting all the major cities and most of the minor ones. But getting around can still be a challenge: there is little signage in English and few people speak anything but Chinese. Consider combining a package tour offered by companies like The China Travel Company with local specialist itineraries offered by operators like Yixing Yiyou (yxlondon@123.com), who have excellent ceramic and art tours around Jiangsu, or China Highlights. Chinese-owned Trip.com is an excellent online resource for multi or single day trips and excursions.

How to get there

While China was very well connected to the UK prior to the pandemic, with direct or easy indirect flights to most of the main provincial capitals, at present flights from the UK with British Airways or Air China are restricted to Beijing and Shanghai. Changes are imminent.

Money-saving tip

Bargaining is not just acceptable in China where prices are not listed, it is expected. This includes most markets – and in China you can buy pretty much anything in a market.

FAQs

What’s the weather like?

Weather varies enormously. Summer in the centre and south can be sweltering, with high humidity and temperatures in the thirties. Shanghai and Yunnan are warm in winter, while temperatures in Harbin and Beijing fall well below zero. Autumn is the best season for Mediterranean warmth in most locations and bright, dry days.

What time zone is it in?

China has one time zone – Beijing time – GMT +8.

What currency do I need?

Yuan

What language is spoken?

Mandarin Chinese throughout the country and regional languages and dialects include Cantonese (Yue), Hunanese (Xiang) and Min.