THE GREAT CITIES OF CHINA
One country, a dozen cities, a lifetime of tours.
Walk the Great Wall above Beijing, stand over the Terracotta Army at Xi’an, watch pandas in Chengdu, ride the Star Ferry across Hong Kong and drift the Li River past Guilin’s peaks. The bookable best of every Chinese city, in one place.
The bucket list
Three sights people cross the world for.
Old cities and good food turn up everywhere. A wall you can see running over the mountains, an underground army eight thousand strong, and a hillside of pandas do not. Three different cities, three reasons to start packing.
Beijing
The Great Wall
It runs for thousands of miles, but the stretch most people walk climbs the hills two hours north of Beijing. Mutianyu for the cable car and the toboggan down, Badaling for the easy access, Jinshanling for the long wild ridgelines. The one sight in China nobody talks themselves out of.
- 1 From Beijing: Mutianyu Great Wall Tours with Options
- 2 Beijing: Mutianyu Great Wall Daily Tour with Ticket & Lunch
- 3 All-Inclusive Tour: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Great Wall
Xi'an
The Terracotta Army
A farmer sinking a well in 1974 hit the shoulder of a clay soldier. Below lay thousands of them, each with a different face, drawn up in battle order to guard a dead emperor. They are still being lifted from the earth outside Xi’an, and standing over the pits is as strange as travel gets.
- 1 Mini Group Xian Day Tour to Terracotta Army, City Wall, Pagoda and Muslim Bazaar
- 2 Xi’an: Terracotta Army Mini Group or Private Tour
- 3 Xian: Terracotta Army Ticket & Guided Bus Tour with Options
Chengdu
The Giant Pandas
Chengdu is where the giant pandas are. Reach the breeding base early, before the heat sends them back up the trees, and you watch them tumble around and work through armfuls of bamboo an arm’s length away. Red pandas pad along the railings while you wait.
- 1 Chengdu: Giant Panda Breeding Research Base Ticket
- 2 Beijing: The Beijing Zoo Entry Ticket with Pandas
- 3 Private Half-Day Chengdu Panda Breeding Center Tour with Optional Volunteer
Start here
China's single most popular tour.
More travellers book this than anything else across every city we cover. If you only lock in one thing before you fly, make it this one.
The classics
China's Most Popular Tours
The Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army, the Shanghai food lanes and Hong Kong’s Big Buddha. The tours that fill up first, pulled from every city.
Where to begin
Start with a city.
Beijing for the Wall and the emperors. Shanghai for the skyline and the food. Hong Kong for the harbour. Xi’an for the warriors. Chengdu for the pandas. Guilin for the river.
First time in China
The classic route: Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai.
Most first trips trace the same line, and for good reason. A week or so links the three cities that hold China’s biggest sights, and fast trains stitch them together. Here is how the days fall.
Imperial Beijing
Six hundred years of running an empire.
For five centuries the orders went out from here. Climb the Great Wall in the morning, cross the moat into the Forbidden City in the afternoon, then lose yourself in the grey-brick hutongs that still wrap around it. Tiananmen, the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace fill out the days. No city anywhere wears its history at this scale.
Explore all Beijing tours →Shanghai
The China of the future.
If Beijing is the past, Shanghai is what comes next. Stand on the Bund at dusk as the Pudong towers switch on across the river, then duck into the lane kitchens for soup dumplings and the night markets. When the city tires you out, a water town or the West Lake at Hangzhou is a fast train away.
Explore all Shanghai tours →Guilin & the Li River
The landscape on the back of the banknote.
South of the big cities the ground breaks into thousands of limestone peaks, and the Li River threads between them. Take the slow cruise from Guilin down to Yangshuo, past water buffalo and bamboo rafts and the exact stretch of karst printed on the twenty-yuan note. The other side of China, and the quiet one.
Explore Guilin & the Li River →Hong Kong
One city, two worlds.
Take the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour, ride the tram up the Peak for the skyline, then catch the cable car out to Lantau, where the Big Buddha sits above an old fishing village and the towers feel a world away. East meets west, harbour meets hills, all on a single transit card.
- 1 Lantau Island Day Trip – Big Buddha & Tai O
- 2 Big Bus Hong Kong Open Top Hop-On Hop-Off Sightseeing Tour
- 3 Hong Kong Day Tour: City Landmarks & Highlights
Zhangjiajie
The mountains that floated in Avatar.
Three thousand sandstone pillars rise straight out of the forest in Hunan, wrapped in cloud, and the film crew behind Avatar borrowed them for the floating Hallelujah peaks. Ride the glass elevator up, walk the cliff-edge glass bridge, and take the cable car over Tianmen Mountain to the hole in the rock the locals call Heaven’s Gate.
See all 11 Zhangjiajie tours →Further afield
Beyond the big six.
Hangzhou for the lake. Zhangjiajie for the peaks. Guangzhou for the dim sum. Yangshuo for the karst. Lhasa for the roof of the world. Chongqing for the hotpot and the river.
Getting around
The cities are a train ride apart.
China runs the largest high-speed rail network on Earth, and it turns a country-sized trip into a series of short hops. No airports, no queues, just city centre to city centre at 300km/h.
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