edit China Travel Guide

• Shanghai — China's largest city, famous for its riverside scenery. Major commercial center; many shopping opportunities
• Suzhou — "Venice of the East", old city, famous for canals and gardens
• Great Wall of China - a series of walls built by various emperors; several thousand kilometers long!
• Hainan island - tropical paradise

Visa Requirements

Most travellers will need a visa. In most cases, this should be obtained from a Chinese embassy or consulate before departure. Please note that traveling to Hong Kong and Macau have different visa requirements. See those guides for more information.

Customs and Immigration

By plane

By car

By boat

By train

China can be reached by train from many of its neighbouring countries and even all the way from Europe.

• To/From Russia and Europe: Two lines of the Trans-Siberian Railway - the Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Manchurian - run between Moscow and Beijing, stopping in various other Russian cities, and for the Trans-Mongolian, in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
• To/From Kazakhstan and Central Asia: From Almaty, Kazakhstan, one can travel by rail to Urumqi in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. There are long waits at the border crossing for customs, as well as for changing the wheelbase for the next country's track.
• To/From Hong Kong: Regular rail service links mainland China with Hong Kong.
• To/From Vietnam: There is also a rail link from Nanning in Guangxi province into Vietnam via the Friendship Pass. There is a second rail link between Kunming in Yunnan province, and Hanoi via Hekou and Lao Cai.
• To/From North Korea: There are four weekly connections between the North Korean capital Pyongyang and Beijing.

Economy

Banking

Currency

The official currency is renminbi (RMB). The base unit of this currency is the yuan, international currency code CNY. All prices in China are given in yuan. As of May 2007, it is at 7.67 to the US dollar.

Credit Cards

Tax

Tipping

Shopping

Costs

Holidays and Celebrations

China is a huge country with endless travel opportunities. However, during holidays, tickets of any kind are hard to come by and the rates for hotel rooms skyrocket. It can be quite difficult to find a seat of any kind, especially for those traveling from remote western China to the east coast or in the opposite direction.

China has three major annual holidays:

• National Day, October 1
• Chinese New Year or Spring Festival (春节 chūnjié), late January to mid February
• Labour Day (May Day), May 1

These aren't one-day holidays. Workers get at least a week or two off for Chinese New Year; students get four to six weeks. Both groups get about a week for National Day and Labour Day.

Also, during early July millions of university students go home and in late August they return to school, jamming transportation options, especially between the east coast and the western provinces of Sichuan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.

At these times, traveling should be planned well in advance or even reconsidered all together. Tens of millions of migrant workers return home and millions of other Chinese travel. Any mode of transportation is crowded and it may be necessary to book well in advance. Also various travel services such as hotels raise their prices for the high season.

Spring Festival is especially busy. Not only is it the longest holiday, it is also a traditional time to visit family, much as Christmas is in the West. More or less all the university students (20-odd million of them!) go home, and more or less all the migrant workers who have left their farms and villages for better pay in the cities go home. This is often the only chance they have. Everyone wants to go home, and China has a lot of "everyone"!

A complete list of Chinese festivals would be very long, since many areas or ethnic groups have their own local ones. See listings for individual towns for details. Here is a list of some of the nationally important ones not mentioned above:

• Lantern Festival, 15th day of the 1st lunar month, just after Chinese New Year, usually in February or March. In some cities, such as Quanzhou, this is a big festival with elaborate lanterns all over town.
• Qingming Festival, about April 4-6, is called "grave sweeping day" in English. Cemeteries are crowded with people who came to sweep tombs and offer sacrifices. Traffic on the way to the cemeteries becomes extremely jammed.
• Dragon Boat Festival, falls on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month, usually in June. Boat races are a traditional part of it.
• Double Seventh Festival, the 7th day of the 7th lunar month, usually August, is a festival of romance, sort of a Chinese Valentine's Day.
• Mid-Autumn Festival or Moon Cake Festival, the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, usually in October. People meet outside, putting food on tables and looking up at the sky while talking about life.
• Double Ninth Festival or Chongyang Festival, 9th day of the 9th lunar month, usually in October.
• Winter Solstice Festival, December 22 or 23.

Language

The official language is Standard Mandarin, although there are many dialects (notably Cantonese, spoken in Hong Kong).

Food in China varies widely from region to region. While visiting, relax your inhibitions and try a bit of everything. Keep in mind that undercooked food or poor hygiene can cause bacterial or parasitic infection, particularly during the summer months. That said, hygiene is better than in, say, the Indian subcontinent. Chinese gourmands place emphasis on freshness so your meal will most likely be cooked as soon as you order it. Searing hot woks over coal or gas fires make even street food usually safe to eat. Do be on the lookout for ripoffs though; it is not at all uncommon to order a common dish (particularly at lowbrow restaurants) and receive a portion that is obviously much smaller than that ordered by a local sitting next to you, while still being charged the full price. However, if you can avoid such blatant hubris, eating in China can be a highlight (perhaps, the highlight) of your trip. NB: Certain dishes are prepared from endangered species, such as stew made from near-extinct turtles from South East Asia or soup flavored by the threatened facai moss, while other dishes may include ingredients that some people may prefer to avoid, such as dog meat.

Types of Restaurants

Types of Food

• Cantonese/ Guangzhou/ Hong Kong: this is the style of cooking that most visitors are already familiar with to some extent. Not too spicy, emphasis on freshly cooked ingredients and seafood. Dim Sum (small snacks usually eaten for lunch/breakfast) are a highlight.
• Sichuan: famously hot and spicy, though not all the dishes are made with live chilis; this is, arguably, the finest cuisine available in the PRC. It is widely available outside Sichuan.
• Hunan: Hunan Cuisine, occasionally referred to on menus as Xiang cuisine, is actually the cuisine of the Xiangjiang region, Dongting Lake and western Hunan Province. Similar to Sichuan cuisine, Hunan food can actually be "spicier" in the Western sense.
• Guizhou: Guizhou cuisine combines elements of Sichuan and Xiang cuisine. It makes liberal use of spicy, peppery and sour flavors.
• Beijing: home-style noodles and baozi (bread buns), peking duck, and cabbage dishes, great pickles. Not fancy but can be great and satisfying.
• Zhejiang: Zhejiang cuisine includes the foods of Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Shaoxing. A delicately seasoned, light-tasting mix of seafood and vegetables often served in soup. Sometimes lightly sweetened or sometimes sweet and sour, Zhejiang dishes frequently involve cooked meats and vegetables in combination.
• Fujian: Fujian cuisine takes most of its ingredients from coastal and estuarial waterways. One particularly famous Fujian dish is "Buddha Jumps over a Wall". The story is that this seafood dish smelled so good a monk forgot his vegetarian vows and leapt over the wall to have some

• various items from the ubiquitous bakeries
• barbecued sticks of meat from street vendors
• jiaozi, which Chinese translate as "dumplings", boiled ravioli-like items with a variety of fillings
• baozi, steamed buns stuffed with salty, sweet or vegetable fillings
• mantou, steamed bread available on the roadside - great for a very cheap and filling snack
• fresh hand-pulled noodles; look for a tiny restaurant with staff in Muslim dress, white fez-like hats on the men and head scarves on the women
• in Guandong and sometimes elsewhere, dim sum. At any major tourist destination in China, someone will be serving dim sum for the Hong Kong customers.

The Western notion of fast food has also reached China. McDonald's, KFC and Pizza Hut are ubiquitous, at least in major cities. There are a few Burger Kings.

Chinese chains such as Dicos (chicken burgers, fries etc., cheaper than KFC and some say better) or Kung Fu (with a more Chinese menu) are also widespread.

Etiquette

Drinks

Teaching a language, most commonly English, is a very popular source of employment for foreigners.

Phones

The country dialing code for mainland China is 86.

Internet

In China the Internet is readily accessible. Internet cafes (wǎngbā) are abundant throughout China. Many of them are designed mainly for gaming though and are not useful places to do business. It is cheap (¥1 to ¥4 an hour) to use a computer, albeit one with Chinese software.

Crime

Petty crime remains relatively low, and it is common for people to quietly carry large amounts of cash. At the same time, one should take the usual precautions against being conspicuously wealthy. In some areas, there are many pickpockets. In crowded markets, buses, and even dance clubs it is common for wallets and mobile phones to disappear. Items such as purses left unguarded at restaurants are also liable to be stolen.

Emergency

• Medical care: 120 (or 999 in some places)
• Directory inquiries: 114

Police

Dial 110

Fire Department

Dial 119

Hospitals

Gays and lesbians

Illicit drugs and prostitution

Smoking

By plane

By train

By car

By bus

By thumb