China is one of the most rewarding countries to travel in and one of the hardest to get right. Here is what to do, what to avoid, and why a guide matters more here than almost anywhere else.
China is one of the most beautiful countries I have ever visited, and I say that as someone who has been to more than 80 of them. Thousands of years of history, food that changes completely every few hundred miles, landscapes that look like they were painted rather than formed, and cities on a scale that is hard to comprehend until you are standing in one.
It is also one of the easiest places to get overwhelmed. The language barrier is real. The country is enormous and there is far too much to see. And the cultural differences run deeper than most first-time visitors expect.
I have been to China twice now, once backpacking and once more recently with my family, and both trips taught me something about how to do it right. So here is my honest take on what you should and shouldn't do on any trip to China.
DO Your Research (and Expect to Dig)
On our recent trip, I was shocked by how little information there was about many of the places we were visiting. Granted, most of them were not tourist hotspots like Beijing or Shanghai. But even so, I found it remarkably difficult to answer basic questions. Which hotel is actually the best in this city? What are the most interesting things to do here? Is this attraction worth a full day or an hour?
Trip.com is a fantastic resource for booking hotels, trains, and activities, and you will end up using it. But its interface is confusing and the information is not always entirely honest. More than once I found hotels posting photos that were clearly not of that hotel.
To get the information you need, you'll have to dig. The best resources I found were travel vlogs on YouTube. Watching someone walk through a place tells you more about what it's really like than any listing ever will. Xiaohongshu, China's answer to Instagram, is a gold mine of information, but it requires Mandarin. [Add any other sources: blogs, forums, Wikivoyage, etc.] Travel blogs and articles can help fill in the gaps.
Here's why the digging matters. China is genuinely complex to navigate. National parks regularly sell tickets only for specific "tracks" or individual attractions rather than the whole park, and if you don't know that in advance you can easily buy the wrong ticket or miss the best section entirely. Some of the most amazing experiences are known only to locals and are never promoted to foreigners at all. The information exists. It just isn't waiting for you in English on the first page of Google.
DO Embrace the Culture
This is advice I would give for any country, but I want to emphasize it for China because it can be daunting for Westerners. China has over 5,000 years of history, and its culture reflects that. The food, the performances, the temples, the way people queue (or don't): all of it will be unfamiliar. And you will be deeply rewarded if you are willing to get a little uncomfortable.
When I was backpacking through China years ago, I walked into a restaurant in Beijing with no Mandarin, no English menu, and no staff who could help. I opened a menu the size of a small book, pointed at a handful of items, and crossed my fingers that whatever arrived would be edible. Some of those dishes were among the best meals I have ever had. To this day I deeply regret not knowing what they were.
On my most recent trip, I took my mother to a performance in Zhangjiajie. The entire show told local legends and the history of the region. Not a word of it was in English. It didn't matter. The staging was magnificent, the performers were extraordinary, and the cultural display came through completely even with the language barrier. It ended up being one of the highlights of the trip.
The point is this. Don't stop yourself from trying something because the food looks different, because you can't understand what's being said, or because you feel out of place. I can't promise you'll love everything. I can promise you'll be rewarded.
DO Learn a Little Mandarin
You don't need to be fluent. You don't even need to be conversational. But learning a few basic sentences in Mandarin before your trip goes a surprisingly long way, and it's one of the easiest things you can do to get more out of your time in China.
Outside of the major cities and big hotels, English is rare. That's not a complaint, it's just the reality of traveling in a country where very few people have a reason to speak it day to day. A handful of words lets you order food, ask for directions, pay for something at a market, or thank the family running your guesthouse without pulling out your phone every time. It changes how you move through a place. Instead of watching the culture around you from the outside, you get to take part in it, even if only a little.
And here's the part most people don't expect: you'd be surprised at how happy people are to hear you try. Chinese is famously difficult for Westerners, and most locals don't expect foreign visitors to know a single word. A simple "nǐ hǎo" (hello) or "xièxie" (thank you) will often be met with a big smile, a laugh, or a string of excited Mandarin you have no hope of understanding. Your pronunciation will be bad and your tones will be off. It doesn't matter. The effort is what counts, and people will meet you halfway.
A few phrases worth learning before you go: "nǐ hǎo" (hello), "xièxie" (thank you), "duōshao qián?" (how much?), "wǒ yào zhège" (I want this one), "bú yào" (I don't want it), "hǎo chī" (delicious), and "tīng bù dǒng" (I don't understand). That last one gets a lot of use. For everything beyond that, download a translation app that works in China before you arrive, since many Western apps are blocked without a VPN. Between a few memorized phrases and a good app, you'll be amazed at how much easier and more rewarding your trip becomes.
DO Have a Guide
I cannot stress this enough. China is an incredibly difficult place to travel independently. Its tourism industry is built almost entirely for domestic travelers, not foreigners, and it shows. Ticketing systems, payment apps, transportation, park logistics, restaurant etiquette: many aspects of travel in China are distinctly Chinese and do not resemble the practices or norms we are used to in the West.
Take something as simple as buying a ticket. Most major attractions in China now use real-name ticketing, meaning every ticket is tied to an ID number and often booked through a Chinese app or WeChat mini program. Popular sites sell out days in advance and release tickets in timed entry slots. Some parks are split into multiple zones with separate tickets, separate shuttle buses, and separate entrances that can be miles apart. None of this is explained in English, and the staff at the gate usually can't help you if you got it wrong.
Then there's the day-to-day stuff. China runs on Alipay and WeChat Pay, and while both now accept foreign cards, plenty of smaller vendors, rural guesthouses, and local buses still don't make it easy. Taxis and DiDi drivers rarely speak English. Menus often have no pictures, let alone translations. Individually these are small hurdles. Stacked on top of each other across a two-week trip, they add up to a lot of time spent solving problems instead of actually enjoying where you are.
A good guide makes all of that disappear. They know which entrance to use, which track to book, which restaurant is actually good, and which "must-see" attraction is a tourist trap. They can explain the history behind the temple you're standing in, order the dishes the locals are eating, and get you into experiences you would never find on your own.
You don't necessarily need a guide for every day of your trip. Beijing and Shanghai are manageable on your own with some preparation. But once you head into the national parks, the smaller cities, and the rural regions where China is at its most spectacular, a guide is not a luxury. It is the difference between seeing China and experiencing it.
DON'T Travel During Golden Week or Public Holidays
If there is one scheduling mistake that can ruin a trip to China, it's this one. China has a handful of national holidays when the entire country goes on the move at once, and you do not want to be competing with them.
The biggest are Golden Week, which runs from October 1st through the 7th for National Day, and Chinese New Year, which falls in late January or February depending on the lunar calendar. During these periods hundreds of millions of people travel domestically at the same time. The travel rush around Chinese New Year is regularly described as the largest annual human migration on the planet. Train tickets sell out within minutes of release. Flights and hotels can double or triple in price. And the attractions you flew across the world to see become shoulder-to-shoulder crowds where you'll spend more time in line than actually looking at anything.
To give you an idea of the scale, popular scenic areas like the Great Wall at Badaling, West Lake in Hangzhou, or Zhangjiajie can see well over 100,000 visitors in a single day during Golden Week. Walkways turn into slow-moving queues. Shuttle bus lines stretch for hours. Many parks actually cap daily visitor numbers during holidays, so if you haven't booked well in advance, you may not get in at all.
The same applies, to a lesser degree, to the May Day holiday (May 1st through 5th) and shorter holidays like Qingming in early April, the Dragon Boat Festival in early summer, and Mid-Autumn Festival in September or October. Chinese school summer holidays in July and August also bring big crowds to the most popular destinations. Before you book anything, look up the holiday calendar for the year you're traveling and plan around it. Shifting your trip by even a week can completely change the experience.
DON'T Break Any Rules or Laws
This should be obvious, but it deserves saying plainly. China takes its rules seriously and enforces them consistently, including the small ones that most of us don't think twice about back home. This isn't meant to scare you off. China is an extremely safe country to travel in, and the vast majority of visitors never have a single issue. But it is not a place to test boundaries.
The best example is one that catches a lot of Westerners off guard: jaywalking. In many Western cities, crossing against the light or cutting across the middle of the street is second nature. In China, don't do it. Many cities have cameras at major intersections specifically to catch jaywalkers, and some have gone as far as putting offenders' faces up on public screens next to the crosswalk. You can be stopped and fined on the spot, and the police won't care that you're a tourist who didn't know better.
It's also just a matter of safety. Traffic in Chinese cities can be chaotic, and the electric scooters that are everywhere are nearly silent. They will come at you from directions you don't expect, including down the sidewalk. Wait for the green light, use the crosswalks and pedestrian bridges, and follow what the locals around you are doing.
Beyond that, use common sense. Keep your passport on you at all times, since you'll need it for hotels, train tickets, and attraction entry. Don't fly a drone without checking the local rules first, since many scenic areas and cities are no-fly zones. And if a staff member or official tells you not to do something, don't argue. When in doubt, ask your guide. They know where the lines are, and they'll keep you well clear of them.
DON'T Just Travel in the Tourist Hotspots
Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong are incredible cities, and I'd never tell anyone to skip them. The Forbidden City, the Bund, and the Victoria Harbour skyline are famous for a reason. But if those are the only places you visit, you'll leave having seen a very small slice of what China has to offer. Much of the most amazing scenery, history, and culture in the country requires getting out of the big cities.
The Great Wall is the perfect example. Most visitors head straight to Badaling, the section closest to Beijing and the one on every tour bus itinerary. It's heavily restored, heavily commercialized, and on a busy day it can feel less like an ancient wonder and more like a theme park queue. Instead, get a guide and head out to a more remote section like Jinshanling. It's a longer drive, roughly two and a half hours from Beijing, but you'll be walking a far more authentic stretch of wall with watchtowers winding across the mountain ridges and, on a good day, hardly another person in sight. It's the Great Wall the way you imagined it.
The same goes for the rest of the country. The towering sandstone pillars of Zhangjiajie, the karst mountains and rivers around Guilin and Yangshuo, the rainbow mountains of Zhangye, the turquoise lakes of Jiuzhaigou, the ancient riverside town of Fenghuang, the villages and rice terraces of Yunnan. These are places that feel like nowhere else on earth, and most first-time visitors to China never make it to any of them.
Getting to these places takes more effort, and that is exactly where your research and your guide pay off. But I promise the effort is worth it. Some of the most memorable moments of my trips to China happened hundreds of miles from the nearest big city.
Final Thoughts
China is not an easy country to travel in, and I won't pretend otherwise. It takes more planning, more patience, and more willingness to be uncomfortable than most destinations. But that is exactly why it's so rewarding. The places that are hardest to reach are often the ones that stay with you the longest.
Between my backpacking trip and my most recent one, I've come away from China with some of my favorite travel memories anywhere in the world. A meal I still can't name. A performance I didn't understand a word of and loved anyway. Mountains and landscapes that genuinely don't look real. None of that happened because the trip was easy. It happened because I did the homework, said yes to the unfamiliar, and had the right people helping me along the way.
So do your research, embrace the culture, learn a few words of Mandarin, and get yourself a good guide. Avoid the holiday crowds, respect the rules, and get out beyond the big cities. Do that, and China will reward you in ways you won't expect. Then you'll understand why I keep wanting to go back.
