Can you use Uber in China?
Opening the Uber app in Beijing or Shanghai will find no drivers. Uber lost the Chinese ride-hailing war and sold its local operation to…
Answers
One question, one page, answered in the first two sentences. These are the things people search three days before flying.
Is tap water safe?
The water leaving a Chinese treatment plant is usually treated to a reasonable standard. The problem is what happens between there and your…
Do I need a VPN?
This is the question most often answered badly, because the honest answer is conditional and most guides give a flat yes. The condition is…
Do credit cards work?
China skipped credit cards. It went from cash straight to QR codes in the 2010s, and the overwhelming majority of urban transactions now…
Is China safe?
Chinese cities are heavily policed and extensively camera-monitored. Whatever one thinks of that in general, its effect on street crime is…
Do you tip?
The bill is the bill. Chinese service staff are paid a wage rather than a tipped minimum, and the transaction is understood to be complete…
Is English spoken?
English is taught throughout the Chinese school system, so a great many people have studied it. Far fewer use it, and confidence drops…
Power bank rules
Two separate rules apply, and travellers usually only know the first. The international rule, which is the same everywhere: lithium power…
Police registration
The requirement applies to every foreign national in China, on any visa or visa-free entry. The window is 24 hours in cities, extended to…
Station arrival time
The instinct from European rail — turn up five minutes before, walk to the platform — does not transfer. Chinese railway stations are built…
Is Airbnb available?
Airbnb operated in mainland China for several years and withdrew its domestic listings in 2022, citing the cost and complexity of the…
Plug adapter
The useful thing to know is that Chinese wall sockets are usually combination sockets: a single fitting with slots for both flat two-pin…
How much cash?
Carrying a large amount of cash in China is a solution to a problem that no longer exists, and it creates a new one — you become someone…
Booking train tickets
Two routes, and the choice is a genuine trade-off rather than an obvious one. The official app: 12306 China Railway's own app. It now has a…
Which hotels take foreigners
This catches people out because it looks like discrimination and is not. Every guest in a Chinese hotel is registered with the local Public…
Vaccinations
This page is orientation, not medical advice. Requirements depend on your medical history, your route and how long you are staying, and a…
Drones
The gap between "can I bring it" and "can I use it" is wider in China than almost anywhere, and travellers routinely carry a drone across…
Is street food safe?
The reflex to avoid street food entirely costs you the best breakfast in the country and does not meaningfully reduce your risk — a busy…
Alipay for foreigners
China skipped cards and went straight from cash to QR codes. Alipay and WeChat Pay are not a convenience there — they are the default, and…
ATMs in China
A rejected card at a Chinese ATM usually means you picked the wrong machine, not that your card is blocked. The network coverage is…
Is China expensive
China is not a backpacker-cheap country in the way parts of Southeast Asia are, but it delivers far more for the money than its economic…
Bargaining
The advice to "always haggle in China" is a decade out of date and was never true of most transactions. Modern urban China runs on fixed,…
Vegetarian in China
China has a deep vegetarian tradition through Buddhism and one of the world's great repertoires of vegetable cooking. It also has a default…
Ordering without Chinese
Ordering is far less of a barrier than most visitors fear, because China solved the problem for its own domestic tourists first — millions…
Baijiu
Baijiu is the most-consumed spirit in the world and almost unknown outside China. It is typically bottled somewhere between forty and sixty…
Leaving food
This is one of the etiquette questions where the old rule and current practice pull in opposite directions, and the honest answer sits…
What not to do
Most of what visitors worry about is not an issue. You will be forgiven almost anything as an obvious foreigner making an obvious effort.…
Bowing in China
This one is worth stating plainly because the mistake is so common, and because getting it wrong is more awkward than doing nothing at all.…
Beijing's two airports
This trips up more visitors than any other Beijing logistics question, because both airports are called "Beijing" and they are nowhere near…
Pudong to the city
Shanghai has two airports and they behave very differently. PVG (Pudong) handles most international arrivals and is far east of the centre.…
Paying for the metro
Chinese metros are excellent — clean, frequent, cheap, signposted in English in every major city. Paying for them is the only part that…
Where to stay in Beijing
Beijing is enormous and laid out as a series of ring roads, so the wrong base means an hour of travel before each day starts. Choose by…
Where to stay in Shanghai
Shanghai divides at the river. Puxi on the west bank is the older city where most of the character lives; Pudong on the east is the skyline…
Capital Airport to the city
Capital sits north-east of the city and is well connected. The decision is essentially train or taxi, and the train usually wins. The…
Metro security checks
This surprises almost every first-time visitor, because no Western metro system does it. It is completely routine, applies to every…
Shanghai Maglev
The Maglev is a genuine engineering landmark — the train never touches the guideway, and nothing in scheduled passenger service has been…
Where to stay in Xi'an
Xi'an is unusually easy to choose a base in, because the old city is still enclosed by its Ming walls and almost everything you want is…
Getting around Chengdu
Chengdu has expanded its metro at remarkable speed, and the result is one of the easier large Chinese cities to move around. The metro…
eSIM and the firewall
Search this question and you will find a dozen confident pages saying yes. Almost all of them are published by companies selling eSIMs. The…
Booking the Forbidden City
This is the single most common way a Beijing itinerary breaks. Visitors arrive expecting a queue and a kiosk, and find neither. How the…
Getting to the Terracotta Army
The site is about 40 km east of the city, and getting there is genuinely easy — the difficulty is that the route is heavily targeted by…
Carrying your passport
Foreign visitors often expect to leave the passport in a hotel safe and carry a photocopy. In China that will stop you at a ticket gate.…
Tibet Travel Permit
Tibet is the one part of China a foreign passport holder cannot simply turn up in, and the permit is the mechanism. There is no…
Booking the Mogao Caves
The Mogao Caves are conserved rather than merely displayed, and the ticketing reflects that. Visitor numbers are capped because breath and…
Great Wall distance
The Wall is not one place, and the distance question only means something once you have picked a section. The gap between the nearest and…
Panda Base timing
This is the most consequential piece of timing advice for a Chengdu trip, and it is routinely ignored because it does not sound like a…
Guangzhou to Hong Kong
The rail link makes this one of the easiest international borders anywhere, which is precisely why the visa arithmetic catches people out.…
Dunhuang station
This is the single most expensive booking mistake on the Silk Road route, and it happens because both stations legitimately serve the…
Visiting Xiamen University
Xiamen University is routinely called China's most beautiful campus, and it is a working university rather than an attraction — which is…
Do you need Chinese?
The honest position is that the language barrier in China is real and almost entirely solvable with preparation rather than study. Where…
Tibetan areas without a permit
The permit requirement is administrative rather than cultural, and the administrative boundary is not the cultural one. This is the most…
Beijing to Harbin
Harbin is 1,200 km northeast of Beijing, and until recently that was an overnight sleeper. The high-speed line has made it a comfortable…
Karakoram Highway permit
Xinjiang as a whole needs no special permit for the main routes. The Karakoram Highway is the exception, because it runs to an…
Getting to Pingyao
Pingyao is one of the easiest additions to a standard China route, because it sits on the line between the two cities most first-time…
Shanghai to Hangzhou
This is one of the busiest short-haul rail corridors in the world, and it is about as easy as intercity travel gets. The train Services run…
Hong Kong and your visa
Politically Hong Kong is part of China. For a border officer it is not, and that distinction is what strands people. What actually happens…
Best translation app
The right answer is a pair of apps with different jobs, plus one piece of preparation that matters more than the choice between them.…
Chengdu to Chongqing
The two cities were a single province until 1997 and still function as a pair. Pretty much every Sichuan itinerary that includes both…
Urumqi to Kashgar
This is one of the longest domestic hops in China — Kashgar is closer to Kabul than to Beijing — so the choice is genuinely between losing…
Zhengzhou to Kaifeng
Kaifeng is close enough to Zhengzhou that it works as a day trip, but the connection changed recently and older advice sends you to the…
Getting to Quanzhou
Quanzhou is easy to reach and easy to arrive at wrongly. The rail connection is excellent; the station names are the problem. The line The…
How long at Huangshan
The honest answer is that a day trip up Huangshan is a long, expensive walk in whatever weather you happen to get. The mountain gives up…
Kunming to Jianshui
Jianshui is in Honghe prefecture in southern Yunnan, closer to Vietnam than to any large Chinese city, and it is far easier to reach than…
Is Google blocked
Google withdrew its mainland search operation in 2010 and the block hardened through 2014. Nothing about it is partial or intermittent any…
Google Maps in China
This is the one blocked service people try hardest to work around, and the one where the workaround fails even when it succeeds. The…
WhatsApp in China
Encrypted foreign messengers are the category China has been least willing to leave alone, and the position has hardened rather than…
Buying a SIM in China
The rule that surprises people is not that you need identification — it is how much identification, and that a shop cannot bend it.…
How much to order
A Chinese menu is not a list of individual meals. Everything arrives in the centre and everyone eats from all of it, so the unit of…
Chinese food at home vs abroad
The honest framing is not that food abroad is fake. It is that you have been eating one dialect of a language and are about to hear the…
Hotpot without the heat
Hotpot is a social meal before it is a spicy one, and the whole format is built to accommodate a table that does not agree about chilli.…
Sichuan vs Hunan spice
These are the two great chilli cuisines of China and they are not variations on one theme. They use different chillies, prepared…
Dairy in Chinese food
For anyone avoiding dairy, China is one of the easier countries in the world to eat in — and the reason is structural rather than a matter…
Vegan restaurants in China
The useful thing to know is that China has had a fully worked-out plant-based cuisine for well over a thousand years, and it is stricter…
Finding good restaurants
The problem is not that good restaurants are hard to find. It is that the tools most visitors reach for cover perhaps one per cent of them.…
When is Chinese New Year
Two questions hide inside this one: what date it falls on, and whether you should be in China when it does. The rule, not a date China's…
Gifts to avoid
Nobody expects a foreign visitor to know these, and getting one wrong will be forgiven instantly. But they are easy to learn and the…
Complaining politely
Complaining works in China. It just runs on different rules from the ones a Western visitor arrives with, and the usual escalation — get…
Roof animals
Once you notice them you cannot stop counting them, and the count is genuinely informative — it is a rank displayed in plain sight on every…
Is Mandarin universal
For a traveller the answer is effectively yes in the places you are most likely to go, and usefully no in a few of the places most worth…
Reading a handscroll
A museum case flattens a handscroll into something it was never designed to be, which is why so many visitors walk past the most important…
Fly or take the train
This is the single decision that shapes a China itinerary most, and the answer is unusually clean because the rail network is unusually…
Beijing to Xi'an by train
This is the busiest single leg on most first China itineraries, and the rail connection is good enough that flying it is close to a…
Beijing or Shanghai first
Most first China trips include both, and the order matters more than people expect — not for logistics, which work either way, but for how…
Guilin or Yangshuo
This is the one decision that changes how much of the region you actually see, and a great many itineraries get it the wrong way round…
Can you hold a panda
This is the most common thing people hope for in Chengdu and it has not been available for years, so it is worth knowing before you build a…
Harbin Ice Festival dates
Almost every English page on this gives 5 January as the answer and stops there, which sends people to Harbin later than they need to go…
Longji terraces timing
The Longji terraces are photographed almost exclusively in two states, and a visitor who arrives between them is often quietly disappointed…
The Wall from space
The claim is one of the most widely repeated facts about China that is not a fact. It predates spaceflight entirely — versions of it…
Octopus card
Octopus (八達通, bāt daaht tūng) launched in 1997 and became the model much of the world copied. You tap it on a reader; the fare comes off…
Emergency numbers
Unlike much of Europe there is no single number. China splits emergencies across four services, and calling the wrong one costs time you…
Departure tax refund
The scheme is called departure tax refund (离境退税, lí jìng tuì shuì) and it applies to foreign passport holders, plus residents of Hong Kong,…
Toilet paper in China
This is a small thing that becomes a large thing at the wrong moment, and it is close to the top of the list of details first-time visitors…
Heating in China
The single most useful thing to understand about winter in China is that it is decided by a line on a map drawn in the 1950s, not by how…
The tea house scam
China is a very safe country for travellers — violent crime against visitors is rare and walking anywhere at night is normal. The risk here…
Travelling to Xinjiang
The question is usually asked because Xinjiang gets confused with Tibet, where independent travel genuinely is not possible. The two are…
Senior ticket discounts
Concessions for older visitors are a statutory obligation in China, not a courtesy each attraction chooses. Article 59 of the Law on the…
Student ticket discounts
Yes, as a category. Students are named explicitly in national policy, and where the concession applies the standard rate is half the adult…
Cash across the border
¥20,000 in renminbi, and the equivalent of US$5,000 in foreign currency. Those are two separate allowances counted separately, and both…
Lighters on Chinese flights
No, in either bag. China's civil aviation authority prohibits passengers from carrying lighters and matches in hand luggage and in checked…
Liquids on domestic flights
Almost none. On a domestic flight within China, liquids are prohibited from hand luggage and must go in the hold. The exception is a short…
Silent carriages
A 静音车厢 (jìngyīn chēxiāng, silent carriage) is an opt-in quiet coach on Chinese high-speed services. You select it when you book, and in…
Bringing medication
Yes, for ordinary medicines in quantities that are plainly for your own use. The complication is that some medicines that are routine…
Drinking age
China does not set a minimum age for drinking alcohol. What it sets is a ban on selling alcohol to anyone under eighteen — a duty on the…
Returning a purchase
If you bought it in a shop and simply changed your mind, there is no legal right to return it. The famous seven-day no-reason return is a…
Buying glasses
Yes. Prescription spectacles are made and dispensed at scale in China, and a finished pair is a routine purchase rather than a specialist…