About this guide
An independent, non-commercial English guide to travelling in China.
- Sights
- 168
- In depth
- 43
- Guides
- 14
- Itineraries
- 7
- Cuisines
- 8
This site exists because most English-language writing about travel in China is either a decade out of date or trying to sell you a tour. Almost everything practical about visiting the country — visas, payments, ticketing, connectivity — changed between 2023 and 2025, and the guidance available has not kept up.
What it covers
43 destinations written up at length, a further 125 in a province-by-province index, 14 practical guides, 7 ready-made routes and 8 regional cuisines. The geographic scope is mainland China plus the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions, which have their own immigration and are treated as such throughout.
How to use it
- New to China? Read Visas & Visa-Free Entry, then Money & Mobile Payments, then SIM Cards & the Firewall. Those three prevent most first-trip problems.
- Know you are going but not where? Start with the itineraries or browse by theme.
- Know where you are going? Go straight to the destination and read the practical section.
- Everything is searchable from one place.
Accuracy and its limits
Prices, opening hours and ticket rules are the most volatile things on this site, and Chinese entry policy has been amended repeatedly since 2024 — almost always in the direction of opening up further. Treat every figure here as an indication of scale rather than a quotation, and verify anything load-bearing — a visa requirement, a permit, a booking window — with the relevant official source before you commit money to it.
Where this guide says something confidently, it is because the underlying fact is stable: the Great Wall's gradients, the release window for Forbidden City tickets, the fact that Google does not work on a domestic connection. Where it hedges, the hedge is deliberate.
How it is built
A pure static site. The content lives in plain JSON files, a small zero-dependency Node script renders them into HTML, and the result is hand-written CSS and about three hundred lines of vanilla JavaScript. There is no framework, no tracking, no analytics, no cookies and no third-party script of any kind — the only external request the page makes is for two fonts.
Photography
All photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under their respective licences, and every image on the site is individually credited on the credits page.