A beginner's travel guide to China

Telegraph

19-05-2025

The Great Wall, Shanghai's skyscrapers, giant pandas, the Terracotta Army, all those delicious dumplings – the reasons to visit China are legion. Hoping to boost its ailing post-pandemic economy, the world's most populous country is declaring to foreign tourists, 'China wants you'. There's no more emphatic plea to visit than the BBC's Race Across the World Season 5, a tourist brochure showcase of China's sleek bullet trains, dreamy landscapes and affable locals.
What's more, it has never been easier to travel to China. At the time of writing, citizens from 38 countries (full list here) can go visa-free for stays of up to 30 days. Two glaring exceptions are the USA and the UK, likely left out due to frosty diplomacy and tit-for-tat immigration policies. The good news is the generous loophole for 'transit' travellers, meaning Britons can skip the paperwork and stay for a whopping 10 days in China visa-free provided onward travel is to a 'third country' rather than straight back home again – Hong Kong counts, or it's a fine excuse to pop across to Japan, Korea or even the grasslands of Mongolia.
For independent travellers, China's nativist tech ecosystem is less of a hurdle than it once was – you can pick up a Chinese SIM card at major airports, where English-speaking staff will also help you link your credit card to China's payment apps. Subscribe to a VPN to hop over the Great Firewall and access Google, Meta et al, and you should hit the ground running. Here's everything you need to know about visiting this fascinating – yet dauntingly huge – country for the first time.
Where to go
Beijing
Meaning 'north capital', Beijing owes its unlikely position on the fringes of Inner Mongolia to China's long history of nomadic conquerors. A dust-caked fortress city just a century ago, the modern capital shed its walls and gates, but preserved China's greatest imperial sights – the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace – and added socialist-realist landmarks like Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall of the People. Throw in a heap of temples, museums, a funky art district and high-spec hotels, and you could easily spend a week in Beijing – especially with expeditions out to the imperial tombs and Great Wall, at its most magnificent in the mountains north of the city.
Tucked inside Beijing's old alleys, The Orchid has double rooms from £85, including breakfast. At the time of writing, British Airways has paused flights to Beijing, but you can fly direct from Heathrow or Gatwick on Air China and China Southern Airlines, and from Manchester and Edinburgh on Hainan Airlines.
Shanghai and the east
Shanghai is China glammed-up for the catwalk; a designer metropolis of space-age towers, chic shopping malls, tree-lined boulevards and European-style architecture inherited from its hundred or so years as a treaty port. Home to the country's most urbane contemporary art, dining and nightlife scenes, Shanghai is also the mainland outpost of Mickey and Minnie – Shanghai Disneyland celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2026.
At the mouth of the Yangtze River, it's an easy train hop through the highlights of the cultured Jiangnan region: Suzhou's canals and classical gardens; Hangzhou with its famous Dragon Well tea and poetic West Lake; scholarly former capital Nanjing; and the mist-swathed granite peaks of Yellow Mountain.
The grand dame Fairmont Peace Hotel has double rooms from £250, including breakfast. British Airways flies from Heathrow direct to Shanghai, but flights are shorter on Chinese airlines (China Eastern, China Southern, Air China), which can use Russian airspace.
The Southwest
Far from the imperial gaze, on the fringes of Tibet and Southeast Asia, a patchwork of peoples with distinct languages, customs, crafts and cuisine took shape over centuries in what are now the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou. Yunnan was once China's backpacker Shangri-La, and a slow-life ethos lingers in hotspots like Dali, a picturesque town cradled between mountain and lake. Over-tourism is a growing concern, though, so consider Guizhou instead – one of China's least developed provinces and home to stunning waterfalls and hillside Miao villages of traditional stilt houses. Chengdu, the tea-loving capital of Sichuan province, is the hometown of pandas and one of the world's great cuisines, where dishes come laced with chillies and mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns.
Wild China offers an Inside Guizhou tour for seven nights from £3,200pp, which joins the dots between minority Miao and Dong ethnic villages while staying in stylish countryside boutique hotels.
The south
With its banyan trees, Cantonese-speaking locals and incense-whorled temples hemmed in by high-rises, China's southern coastal regions are a mixture of modernity and tradition. Hong Kong, its old freedoms eroding, still entices with skyline vistas from Victoria Peak, and you can zip over the world's longest sea-bridge to Macao, a former Portuguese colony. Head to the mainland for Guangzhou's bustling markets, tech-forward Shenzhen and the remarkable diaolou of Kaiping, multi-storey defensive towers rising up over villages. Even more impressive are the tulou of Fujian province – circular, fortress-style residential strongholds that were once reportedly mistaken as missile silos on US satellite photos. In Guangxi province, the karst peaks of the Li River valley are the China of the imagination, while the tropical island of Hainan is where Chinese families go to lounge by the pool at beach resorts.
Hong Kong's luxurious hotel The Murray has harbour-view double rooms from £350, including breakfast. Cathay Pacific flies several times daily between Heathrow and Hong Kong, and you can also fly direct from London to Guangzhou (China Southern Airlines) and Shenzhen (Air China). In May 2025, Hainan Airlines launched a weekly direct flight between London and Hainan.
The Silk Road and the west
The ancient trade artery linking China with Central Asia and beyond, the Silk Road had its eastern terminus in Xi'an, capital of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Branded a book-burning tyrant by later dynasties, Qin was buried with a ghostly army of life-sized terracotta soldiers – uncovered by chance in 1974 and now one of China's most iconic sights.
From the city gates of Xi'an, the old caravan route winds through the Loess Plateau and desert outposts of Gansu province, alongside wind-scoured remains of the Great Wall and fortress towns like Dunhuang, famed for its Mogao Caves – a treasure trove of Buddhist art carved into cliffside grottoes. Beyond lies Xinjiang, a vast region that was once a thriving crossroads of central Asian cultures, with traces of Silk Road history still visible in cities like Turpan and Kashgar.
Wild Frontiers offers a Chinese Silk Road Taklamakan Adventure tour that takes 18 nights to travel overland from Xi'an to Kashgar, from £4,650pp.
The Yangtze river
Asia's mightiest river flows for nearly 4,000 miles from the Tibetan plateau to the East China Sea near Shanghai. A Yangtze cruise through the Three Gorges (four to five nights) is a staple of Chinese group tours, though the drama has been tamed somewhat by the colossal Three Gorges Dam, which raised water levels by over 100 metres, obliterating archaeology and displacing 1.3 million people from submerged riverside towns. Cruises typically begin in Chongqing, a sweltering megacity famous for its steep streets and spicy hotpot feasts, and end near Yichang, with various excursions on route. To the south lies Zhangjiajie, home to China's most otherworldly landscape: skyscraper-sized quartz-sandstone pinnacles said to have inspired the alien world in James Cameron's Avatar.
Victoria Cruises bills itself as the only American-managed cruise line on the Yangtze. The newest of its fleet of ships is Victoria Isabella, with a capacity for 570 passengers, embarking on its maiden voyage in autumn 2025.
How to get there
The Trans-Siberian passenger train route between Moscow and Beijing has been suspended since 2020, so flying is the only option from the UK. Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong are China's major gateway cities, with multiple daily flights departing from London Heathrow and Gatwick. Hunt around and you'll find direct UK-China connections between other cities too, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Haikou (Hainan) and Chengdu.
Since Russia's war in Ukraine, Chinese airlines have an advantage in that they can fly through Russian airspace into China, whereas carriers of other nations have to make longer detours, adding up to a couple of hours each way. Trip.com, a Chinese-owned travel booking site, often has the best deals for flights to China, and (in my personal experience) decent and prompt customer service should things go awry. Use the multi-city tool when booking to take advantage of China's 10-day visa-free transit policy. It's also the easiest platform to book high-speed trains in China.
When to book
If you're joining an organised China tour, it's best to book well in advance, ideally several months before your intended travel dates. With travel picking up again in China, there's a serious shortage of English-speaking guides and support staff, many of whom switched careers during the pandemic and haven't returned.
When to go
Broadly speaking, the best months to travel in China are April to June and September to November, when the weather is fine and the crowds are manageable. There are certain times to swerve: Chinese New Year (around late Jan-Feb), when many restaurants and businesses close and inter-city travel gets booked solid; and the first week of October, which is an extremely busy national holiday. July and August get uncomfortably sticky almost everywhere save for the steppe and mountain regions, while winters in northern cities like Beijing are icy-cold but not unappealing: ice-skating on frozen lakes and a frosty Great Wall free of crowds.
How much does it cost?
Return flights in economy start at around £500 (sometimes lower). Multi-city bookings, which tend to be good value with Chinese airlines, are worth looking into. A tour will cost anything from £2,000 to £6,000 and upwards per person, depending on the standard of hotels, food and services on the route.
For independent travellers, high-speed train tickets in China are fairly cheap – Beijing to Shanghai, for example, taking four to five hours to cover the 750 miles between the two cities, costs around £60. When it comes to hotels, you've got heaps of choice and prices are reasonable, Hong Kong excluded. You can eat cheaply and well pretty much everywhere, and a bottle of beer in local restaurants is often under a quid.
What to book
Bucket list itinerary
Wendy Wu Tours (0808 274 8594; wendywutours.co.uk) is offering savings of up to £350 per person on China tours, and offering a 'partner flies free' deal, as part of a Race Across the World promotion (offer ends June 20). Aimed at first-timers, their top-selling Wonders of China Tour ticks off Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an, a Yangtze River Cruise and more. 14 nights in four-star accommodation from £4,090pp.
Expert-led tours
Wild China (0086 10 6465 6602; wildchina.com) has some intriguing tours, including A Gastronomic Tour of China with Fuchsia Dunlop, hosted by the noted Chinese food expert and author; from £6,700pp for 13 nights. Another is In the Footsteps of Wallis Simpson led by Paul French, the British writer of books on Chinese history, including true-crime tale Midnight in Peking and Her Lotus Year about Wallis Simpson's formative sojourn in China, which this tour investigates. From £6400pp for 10 nights.
Go further
Intrepid Travel (0808 274 5111; intrepidtravel.com) provides the opportunity to cross the roof of the world. Its Tibet: Beijing to Kathmandu Overland package starts in the capital then travels across China to Lhasa on the world's highest railway. The journey continues overland to Mount Everest and through the border into Nepal. From £3,015pp for 15 nights.
Local touches
Experience the landscapes of Guangxi province in style with Insiders Guilin by Bespoke Travel Company (0086 151 0167 9082; bespoketravelcompany.com). This tour includes the iconic rice terraces, hikes to remote villages to investigate local crafts and cuisine, bamboo river rafting and more. Five nights from £1,450pp.
Know before you go
Visas: For stays longer than 10 days and/or that don't fall under the transit loophole, British travellers to China will need a visa. The application process has largely moved online since April 2025, though you do still have to go to a Chinese Visa Centre (London, Manchester, Edinburgh or Belfast) to submit your passport and biometrics.
Paying for things: When it comes to money, you'll be at a major disadvantage in China if you don't have the means to use Alipay or WeChat for transactions. It's worth downloading both apps to your phone before you travel.
Using your phone: It's also well worth investing in a VPN subscription that covers the duration of your trip. Failing that, the only way to access Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and almost any other useful app or website is by paying for data while roaming with your regular UK mobile provider, which can be costly.