Travel Guide

Last spring I took my sister on a Beijing Xi’an Chengdu itinerary and watched her go from “I just want the Wall” to “the pandas are the best thing I’ve…

When clients ask me for the single best way to see China on a limited vacation, I almost always recommend a China 12-day itinerary. It’s long enough to feel the…

The first thing to unlearn: there is no “China climate” In October you can be sweating in Hong Kong while Harbin is already below freezing. So any honest calendar has…

Start with the hub-and-spoke instinct Most first-timers land in Beijing or Shanghai. Good news: those two cities sit on a high-speed rail network that puts the rest of the country…

We have taken families, teens, and skeptical adults through China’s big parks, and in our experience the local scene has outgrown its copycat reputation. Theme parks in China now span…

We have helped dozens of travelers turn a holiday curiosity into real conversational ability, and in our experience there is no faster way to study Mandarin in China than to…

We have sent travelers to paddle everything from glassy alpine lakes to subtropical mangrove channels, and in our experience the karst rivers of Guangxi remain the single most photogenic place…

Most people don’t picture China as a skydiving destination, which is exactly why the travelers we send come back so fired up about it. The sport is younger here than…

If there’s one live performance we tell every first-time visitor to China not to skip, it’s an acrobatics show. The discipline has roots going back more than two thousand years,…

Few art forms announce “China” as instantly as the painted face, the high vibrato, and the crash of percussion that is Peking Opera. We’ve taken first-time travelers in Beijing to…