China is enormous. Book the right four days.
Which stretch of the Wall you should actually walk. Whether the warriors need a full day. What a Li River morning costs. Every tour in China, ranked by the people who took it.
The Great Wall is not one place. Pick your stretch.
All Great Wall tours →Every Beijing itinerary has a Wall day in it, and the section decides what kind of day it is: a cable car and a toboggan, an eight-hour ridge hike, a coach stop ninety minutes from the city, or an unrestored scramble with nobody on it. Same wall, six completely different mornings.
Mutianyu Great Wall Daily Tour with Ticket & Lunch
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All-Inclusive Tour: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Great Wall
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- MutianyuCable car up, toboggan down, restored battlements244 tours
- BadalingClosest to Beijing, busiest, easiest underfoot38 tours
- JinshanlingThe long ridge walk, watchtower to watchtower43 tours
- Simatai & GubeiNight lighting above a rebuilt canal town29 tours
- HuanghuachengThe lakeside stretch, part of it under water18 tours
- JiankouUnrestored and steep; for people who scramble11 tours
The six days most China trips are built around.
The Wall, the Forbidden City, the buried army at Xi’an, the pandas at Chengdu, the sandstone towers of Zhangjiajie and a morning in the hutongs. Everything else is a bonus.
Beijing runs on an axis. Walk it in the right order.
The old city is laid out north to south and the good days follow it: Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, then Jingshan for the view back over the roofs. Keep the Temple of Heaven for a morning of its own and the Summer Palace for an afternoon on the water.
Xi’an: the army, the wall, and the best street food in China.
Four and a half hours by fast train from Beijing and worth two nights. The warriors take a morning, the Ming-era city wall takes a bicycle, and the Muslim Quarter takes an appetite. Most people do all three and wish they had stayed longer.
What travellers in China book more than anything else.
Every review →Ranked by the number of travellers who have taken each one and left a rating. Prices are what the operator asks today.
1
Mutianyu Great Wall Tours with Options
Mutianyu Great Wall day trip from Beijing with round-trip coach, skip ticket lines, guided options, tea and snacks, lunch choices.
From · $19
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2
Forbidden City Tour(Group/Private)-Tickets Included
from $4
3
T-Square & Forbidden City Group or Private Tour
from $17
4
Mutianyu Great Wall Daily Tour with Ticket & Lunch
from $18
5
All-Inclusive Tour: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Great Wall
from $128
6
MuBus: Mutianyu Great Wall ENG/ESP/RUS Guided Bus Tour
from $20
7
Tian’anmen Square & Forbidden City W Optional Tours
from $15
8
4-Hour Small Group Tour to Forbidden City with Entry Tickets
from $15
What a day in China actually costs.
Every priced tour on the site, sorted by fare. Entry tickets start at the price of a bowl of noodles; a private driver for the Wall costs about the same as a hotel night.
Entry tickets, hutong walks, a Temple of Heaven morning, an acrobatics seat.
The standard group day out: a Wall section with transport, the warriors, a food crawl.
Private cars and English-speaking guides, and the two-city days by fast train.
Multi-day trips: Lhasa and Everest Base Camp, Yangtze sailings, week-long loops.
Per-person fares only. Private cars and charters quoted per group are marked wherever they appear and are left out of these bands.
Shanghai is two cities and a river between them.
The Bund faces one century and Pudong faces the other, and the good parts are a long way apart — the old town, the plane trees of the French Concession, the canal towns an hour out. Days here are about the route, not the list.
- 1Authentic Local Food Tour in Central Shanghaifrom $79
- 2Zhujiajiao Water Town and Shanghai City Private Day Tourfrom $246
- 3Private Shanghai Full Day City Tour with Old and New Highlightsfrom $115
Three things you can only do in China.
Temples, markets and mountain cable cars exist all over Asia. A panda breeding base, a buried terracotta army and a city built out of river ice do not.
The Breeding Bases
Chengdu keeps the world’s giant pandas in two research bases, and the animals are only awake and interested in you for the first couple of hours after opening. Go at the gate time, not after lunch. Every tour here is a walk-round visit or a volunteer day preparing food and cleaning enclosures; nobody hands you a cub, and the operators that used to have stopped.
- 1Giant Panda Breeding Research Base Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 580 reviews
- 2The Beijing Zoo Entry Ticket with Pandas★★★★★★★★★★ 4.1 · 368 reviews
- 3Private Half-Day Chengdu Panda Breeding Center Tour with Optional Volunteer★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 353 reviews
The Buried Army
A farmer digging a well in 1974 hit the shoulder of a life-size clay soldier. There are thousands more behind him and each face is different. Pit One is the one everyone photographs; Pit Three is the command post and takes ten minutes; the bronze chariots in the museum hall are the thing most people walk past and later regret.
- 1Mini Group Xian Day Tour to Terracotta Army, City Wall, Pagoda and Muslim Bazaar★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,320 reviews
- 2Terracotta Army Mini Group or Private Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 926 reviews
- 3Terracotta Army Ticket & Guided Bus Tour with Options★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 579 reviews
The City Made of Ice
For a few weeks either side of January, Harbin cuts blocks out of the frozen Songhua River and builds a full-size city with them: towers, slides, whole streets, lit from inside after dark. It is genuinely minus twenty and the tours that include a car and a driver are not an indulgence.
- 12-Day Harbin City Private Tour in Your Way in Winter Season★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 26 reviews
- 21-Day Harbin Private Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 22 reviews
- 3Harbin Winter Warm Clothing Rental★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 15 reviews
Down south the mountains come out of the water.
The karst country around Guilin and Yangshuo is the landscape on the back of the twenty-yuan note, and a Li River morning on a bamboo raft is the cheapest famous view in China. Give it a full day, add the rice terraces at Longji if you have two.
Browse Guilin & Yangshuo →
Four things in China that cannot be booked the night before.
Most of this country can be arranged from your hotel lobby on the day. These four run on permits, seasons, sailing dates and daily caps that have nothing to do with when your flight lands.
- 01Tibet Tour 8 Days Lhasa to Everest Base Camp Small Group TourTravel to Tibet runs on permits the operator files for you, and the paperwork takes weeks — the tour is booked long before the flight.
- 022-Day Group City Tour Package with Harbin Ice and Snow FestivalThe ice city is built for a season and melts. Rooms and drivers in Harbin are gone by early December.
- 03Two Rivers Night Cruise- Yangtze & Jialing RiversRiver ships sail on fixed dates with a fixed number of cabins. Miss the sailing and the next one is days away.
- 04Dujiangyan Panda Volunteering Experience with LunchVolunteer days at the panda bases take a handful of people each morning and are reserved well ahead.
Beijing bakes in July and Shanghai’s plum rains arrive in June.
The heat is the real problem, not the rain: a July afternoon on the Wall or in the Forbidden City is a long way from shade. Move the outdoor half of the day to the early morning and put the middle of it under a roof — a cooking bench, a tea table, a theatre seat, a museum hall.
By city — where are you based?
Beijing868 tours
Shanghai372 tours
Xi’an208 tours
Hong Kong174 tours
Chengdu125 tours
Guilin71 tours
Zhangjiajie50 tours
Chongqing39 tours- Every city and region →
By experience — what kind of day is it?
Beijing, Xi’an, Guilin, Shanghai — two weeks, four trains.
Beijing
Xi’an
Chengdu
Guilin
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