Four thousand years, and about ten spare days.
Which stretch of wall is worth the drive. What the Palace Museum ticket really costs. Whether the warriors justify the bullet train west. Reviews of the tours you can actually book in China.
Mutianyu, the Palace Museum, the warriors, a Shanghai food street.
The four bookings a first trip through China is built around. What each costs, and what the travellers who took it say.
01The wall dayMutianyu Great Wall Tours with OptionsMutianyu is the restored stretch with the cable car and the toboggan, ninety minutes out of the city. Go on a weekday and the crowds thin above tower fourteen.
02The palace morningForbidden City Tour(Group/Private)-Tickets IncludedEntry to the Palace Museum is capped and named, and it shuts on Mondays. Book the slot before you book the hotel.
03The reason to go westTerracotta Army Mini Group or Private TourThree pits of ranked infantry, an hour outside Xi’an. The bullet train from Beijing makes it a long day rather than an overnight.
04Dinner, found for youAuthentic Local Food Tour in Central ShanghaiShanghai eats late and hides the good places up staircases. A local walks you through six of them.
Every Great Wall day starts with one question: restored, or wild.
Mutianyu and Badaling are rebuilt, ticketed and reachable in ninety minutes. Jinshanling and Simatai are broken, steep and largely empty. Three ways up, and what each costs to board.
Beijing for the wall, Xi’an for the warriors, and the south for the scenery.
A capital with an imperial city inside it, a river port that grew a skyline, a walled town guarding a buried army, a harbour city that eats around the clock, a panda base and a valley of limestone towers. Six starting points, with the best day out in each.
Beijing: the palace early, the wall on a weekday, the lanes after dark.
The whole Beijing list →
The imperial core takes a morning if you are quick and a full day if you are not. Add the wall on its own day and leave the evening for whatever is grilling in the hutongs. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the capital.
The Palace Museum, and getting in at all
Tickets are capped, named and released on a rolling window, and the gate turns away anyone whose passport does not match. A guided entry does the paperwork for you and takes you in through the side halls most people walk past.
Mutianyu, not Badaling
Badaling is closer to the city and takes the coaches. Mutianyu sits half an hour further out, keeps its trees, and runs a cable car up and a metal toboggan back down. Same wall, a third of the elbows.
Hutong lanes, and eating along them
Grey brick alleys behind the Drum Tower, a courtyard or two, and a run of small places doing lamb skewers, jianbing and beer poured into plastic. Walk it at dusk when the lanes fill up.
The days out more travellers take than any others in China.
Every Chinese tour we have reviewed →The wall runs, the palace entries and the warrior day trips that carry the heaviest traffic, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Dolphin Cruise, Big Buddha & Lantau Island Tour
Spend seven hours exploring Lantau Island with an English-speaking guide such as Grace, Lok Lok, Eva, or Becky. Ride the train and bus, cruise for dolphins, visit Tai O’s stilt houses and floating market, see the Big Buddha, and choose the cable car for wide island views. Lunch and cable car access depend on the option selected.
From · $35
Read our review →
2
Lantau Island Day Trip – Big Buddha & Tai O
from $48
3
Mini Group Xian Day Tour to Terracotta Army, City Wall, Pagoda and Muslim Bazaar
from $49
4
Mutianyu Gt Wall Trip, Depart 8-10am Bus w/ Tickets
from $18
5
Beijing Hutong Walking Food and Beer Tour at Hidden Restaurants
from $80
6
Big Bus Hong Kong Open Top Hop-On Hop-Off Sightseeing Tour
from $53
7
Zhujiajiao Water Town and Shanghai City Private Day Tour
from $246
8
Mutianyu Great Wall & Summer Palace Day Tour
from $29
Chinese cities do their best work once the lights come on.
The Bund lights up at seven and the river fills with boats. Acrobats are on twice a night in Beijing, Sichuan opera changes faces in Chengdu, and the night markets in Xi’an and Kowloon are still frying at midnight. Almost none of it needs planning more than a day ahead.
Shanghai keeps a canal town half an hour from its tallest tower.
The Bund and Pudong face each other across the Huangpu and both are better from the water. Behind them the French Concession is plane trees and low houses, and out past the ring roads Zhujiajiao is bridges, boats and a garden older than the city.
All the Shanghai day trips →
Eight regional cuisines, and almost no English on the menu.
Sichuan numbs, Cantonese steams, Shaanxi bakes its bread in a clay oven and Shanghai puts soup inside the dumpling. A local walking you through it is the difference between eating well for a fortnight and eating hotel breakfast.
Southern China grows its mountains in columns.
Zhangjiajie is a forest of sandstone pillars with a glass bridge strung between two of them, and Guilin is limestone towers standing in a green river. Both are long journeys from the coast, and both are the reason people come back a second time.
Chinese days out, grouped by what they cost.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. Entry tickets to some of the best sights in the country cost less than lunch.
Palace and park entries, cable cars, acrobatic shows and the bus tours out to the wall.
Full days: a guided wall run, the warriors from Xi’an, a canal town, a food walk with a local.
Private guides, bullet-train day trips to another province, and the multi-day runs to Tibet or Zhangjiajie.
Three things that happen only here.
Old walls and good food exist everywhere. Two thousand kilometres of defensive brick over a mountain ridge, a face that changes in front of you, and a hillside carved into eight hundred years of steps do not.
The Wall at Mutianyu
The wall was never one wall. Successive dynasties built and abandoned their own lines, and what visitors climb today is mostly Ming, rebuilt in the 1980s. Mutianyu keeps twenty-two watchtowers over about two kilometres of walkable rampart, the steepest of them near tower twenty, and the forest below it turns properly red in late October.
- 1Mutianyu Great Wall Tours with Options★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 9,216 reviews
- 2Mutianyu Great Wall Daily Tour with Ticket & Lunch★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 3,056 reviews
- 3All-Inclusive Tour: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Great Wall★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 2,873 reviews
Sichuan Opera
Bian lian is the trick the whole theatre waits for: a performer sweeps a sleeve past his head and the painted silk mask underneath has already become another colour. The method is a guild secret, taught by masters to chosen students, and the fastest artists change a dozen faces in under a minute. Chengdu teahouses have run the show nightly for generations.
- 1Red Theatre Beijing Acrobatic Show Tickets★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 461 reviews
- 2Circus World ERA Theatre Acrobatics Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 283 reviews
- 3Shanghai Circus World: ERA2 Intersection of Time Acrobatics Show★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 235 reviews
The Longji Terraces
Zhuang and Yao farmers began cutting these steps into the ridges above Longsheng in the Yuan dynasty and are still working them by hand. The water goes in around May and the hills turn to mirrors; by September the crop is gold, and in winter the whole ladder disappears under cloud. No machinery has ever been up there.
- 1Longji Rice Terraces with Minority Village Private Day Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 122 reviews
- 2Longji Rice Terraces: Full-Day Private Tour from Guilin★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 85 reviews
- 31-DAY Private Longji Rice Terraces and Minority Villages Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 69 reviews
Four Chinese bookings that will not wait for you.
Most of this country can be arranged the night before from a hotel lobby. These four run on permit offices, capped daily quotas and a festival that melts.
- 01Forbidden City Tour(Group/Private)-Tickets IncludedThe Palace Museum caps daily entries, sells them by name against a passport, and closes on Mondays. Sell-outs in summer are routine.
- 02Tibet Tour 8 Days Lhasa to Everest Base Camp Small Group TourTibet needs a Travel Permit, and the permit is only issued against a booked tour with a registered operator. Allow weeks, not days.
- 03Full Day Private Tour to Harbin Ice and Snow FestivalHarbin carves the festival out of river ice, so the season runs from about January to late February and then it is water again.
- 042-Day Avatar Mountain, Glass Bridge, and Mt. Tianmen TourZhangjiajie’s glass walkways run on timed entry slots with a daily cap, and the park is a full day’s travel from anywhere.
When a billion people take the same week off.
The first week of October and the fortnight around Chinese New Year are the two times the whole country travels at once. Ticketed sites hit their caps by mid-morning, trains sell out a fortnight ahead and the wall becomes a queue. The answer is the same as it is in a heatwave: book indoors, book small, and book early in the day.
By place: capital, coast and the interior
By kind of day: wall, palace, kitchen or river
Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Guilin, Shanghai: the route almost everybody takes first.
New Chinese days out, just reviewed.
Newer days out across China →
Summer Palace, Sacred Road&Ming Tombs Private Tour
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Beijing Private Tour: Summer Palace, Panda House and Options
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Summer Palace 3 Hours Guided Tour with Entry Ticket
Read our review →
Bullet Train Day Tour to Shaolin Temple&Martial Arts
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Beijing Royal Banquet with Chinese culture prefermance
Read our review →
Acrobatic Show Tickets Traditional & Modern Fusion
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Red Theatre Acrobatics Show Ticket-Local Must-See
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Beijing Private Custom Tour: Licensed Guide&Transfer Service
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