What not to do on your first trip to China

We receive dozens of itineraries put together at home. They almost always carry the same defects, and none of them is about money — they are about rhythm, geography and timings. It is worth going through the nine mistakes before you buy the flight.

1. Five cities in nine days

It is mistake number one and the easiest to avoid. Five cities in nine days give you one night in each place, four hotel changes, at least two long journeys and a permanent sense of being behind. China is not seen in passing: the big sites demand half a day each, and museums close on Mondays.

For ten days, our recommendation has stood for years: Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai. For fourteen, you add a fourth region, not a fifth big city.

2. Arriving at the Forbidden City at half past ten

The difference between going in at 8:30am and at 10:30am is the difference between seeing the largest ensemble of wooden architecture in the world and seeing the backs of two thousand people. The ticket office opens at 8:30am; most groups arrive at ten.

The same applies to the Terracotta Army (opens at 8:30am, arrive at 8:15am) and the Great Wall (Mutianyu at 7am, before the coaches that leave the city at 7:30am). Reserve at least two of those three for the mornings, and leave museums and city walks for the afternoons.

3. Not booking named tickets in advance

China has adopted named tickets almost universally at its first-tier monuments: the ticket asks for the passport number, admits a limited number of visitors a day, and sells out. The Forbidden City releases tickets seven days ahead and sells out the same day in April, May, September and October. The Shaanxi History Museum is free but has a daily cap. Tickets for the Bailong lift in Zhangjiajie sell out in July.

Book on the first day they become available. We do it for our clients because we know the day and the hour for each place.

4. Sleeping in the wrong place to save forty euros

In Shanghai, in Chengdu and above all in Guilin, sleeping outside the centre costs you an hour of transport in each direction, every day. In Yangshuo, sleeping in Guilin is the classic mistake: the city is a transit point, and Yangshuo is where the landscape is.

Choose hotels by the map, not by the pool. In Beijing, inside the second ring, near the metro. In Shanghai, Jing’an or the old concession. In Yangshuo, on the bank of the Li river.

5. Ignoring the real distance between regions

China is larger than Europe, and you cannot see that on a map. Hangzhou to Shanghai is thirty minutes; Xi’an to Guilin is not thirty minutes. The routes that look short on the map take the whole day, and the geography of the country means internal flights are so often the better option.

Practical rule: train up to six hours, plane above that. And never two long transfers on consecutive days.

6. Landing on two Golden Weeks without knowing it

The first week of October (National Day) and the week of Lunar New Year are the two periods when Chinese people travel en masse and when the monuments take tens of thousands of visitors a day. There are also short holidays with local pressure on 1 May and at Qingming, in April.

Before buying the flight, ask us about the month in question. It is a two-line answer that avoids the worst week of the year.

7. Going to Tibet without planning a month ahead

Entering Tibet requires its own permit, issued against a closed itinerary, at least twenty days in advance, and it does not allow independent travel: the guide is mandatory for the whole stay. Nobody resolves this in the week before the flight.

Add the altitude: 3,650 metres in Lhasa, 3,200 in Shangri-La. Anyone intending to include high regions needs nights of acclimatisation along the way, not an arrival straight from sea level.

8. Installing apps after you land

WeChat, Alipay, Amap, Didi and — for anyone who needs one — a VPN should be installed and tested before the flight. Some app stores are slow from Chinese networks, and VPN sites do not open.

Paying without Alipay or WeChat Pay turns the trip into a succession of problems in restaurants, markets and ticket offices. It is the difference between easy and difficult, and it takes fifteen minutes to sort out at home.

9. Doing the trip alone out of pride

The last mistake is not a geographical one. A lot of people organise everything themselves and then discover that the language barrier closes doors: in a teahouse in Chengdu, in a market in Xi’an, in a Hani village in Yunnan. China is not experienced the same way with a translator in your pocket.

A guide in your own language is not there to translate signs — he is there to explain why the bells face north, to negotiate the price of the raft, and to know that today’s sunrise will come to nothing and tomorrow’s will be worth it.

Before the flight: what gets sorted out at home

Half of these mistakes are resolved in an afternoon at home, not in China. It is worth closing four things before you board: the named tickets for the big monuments, on the first day they become available; the apps installed and tested, with the card already linked to Alipay and WeChat Pay; a hotel booking confirmed in writing, with the address in Chinese, which is what you show a taxi driver; and a buffer day at the end of the itinerary for whatever the weather would not let you see.

There is a fifth, and it is the most forgotten: carry the flight number, the hotel address and the itinerary printed on paper. A phone with a flat battery at nine at night in a station in Xi’an is a small problem with a small solution, as long as the paper exists.

What we do with the itineraries that reach us

When an itinerary made at home comes in, we do not throw it away: we cut a city, move a visit to the morning, and say where to stay. Most of the time people were already right about the essentials and only wrong about the order and the rhythm — which is precisely the part that gets resolved by someone who knows the hours of each place.

The two questions that come before all the others are how many days you have and how much you want to spend. Our Essential China answers both with ten days in the three classic cities, and it is the starting point from which almost everything else gets built. For the formalities, read the visa and documents guide before you buy the flight, and not afterwards.