Planning a Trip to China: Everything You Actually Need

China is not a difficult country to travel in. It is a country where the ordinary systems are unfamiliar, and where the gap between prepared and unprepared is wider than anywhere else I have been.

Get four things right before you fly and the rest is easy: a payment app that works, a phone number that stays reachable, a map that speaks English, and an understanding of how train tickets go on sale. Get them wrong and you will spend your first week solving problems at counters, in queues, with a phone that will not do what you need.

This is what I worked out preparing six weeks across the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some of it I have since tested. Where I have not, I say so.

What’s in this article

1. Visas: the rules changed
2. The Great Firewall, and the way around it
3. The apps, in order of importance
4. Money: how paying actually works
5. The traps that cost people money
6. Trains: the fifteen-day window
7. Hotels: what to book and where
8. DiDi, explained properly
9. ATMs and cash
10. Holidays that will ruin your week
11. Food, if you cannot take heat
12. Power, plugs and charging
13. How AI helps with all this

Visas: the rules changed

This is the part most out-of-date advice gets wrong, so check it yourself rather than trusting any article, including this one.

As of 2026, China’s unilateral visa-free policy covers ordinary passport holders from around fifty countries, including most of Europe. Sweden was added in early 2026. The allowance is thirty days per entry, for tourism, business, family visits or transit, with a passport valid at least six months from arrival.

Two things follow from that. First, the policy is explicitly temporary and currently runs to the end of 2026, so if you are reading this later, verify before assuming. Second, thirty days is a hard ceiling. My mainland segment is twenty-eight days, which fits, but a longer stay means a proper visa with the lead time that implies.

If you hold two passports, travel the entire trip on one of them. Every border, every hotel, every train, every booking. Mixed documents create name mismatches that break payment app verification and hotel registration, and you will not enjoy discovering that at a guesthouse desk in a small town.

Which brings up the name itself. Whatever your passport’s machine-readable zone says, those two lines at the bottom of the photo page, that is the string every Chinese system wants. Accents and umlauts get transliterated there in ways the printed fields do not show. My surname prints one way and machine-reads another. Use the machine-readable version everywhere and the systems agree with each other.

The Great Firewall, and the way around it

Google, Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and most Western services are blocked in mainland China. Hong Kong and Taiwan are unaffected and behave normally.

Install a VPN before you fly, because you cannot download one once you are there. Two is better than one, on different infrastructure, since which VPN works varies week to week. The mainstream commercial ones are the usual choices, and a self-hosted connection back to your own home network is the least likely to be blocked, since the Firewall targets known commercial endpoints.

Here is the part that is less well known and changes the picture. A foreign eSIM roaming in China routes through non-mainland gateways and bypasses the Firewall on cellular. Google and Gmail simply work on mobile data, with no VPN at all. The VPN is really for hotel wifi, which is domestic and filtered.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because of a conflict I will come back to: your VPN and your payment app will fight each other.

The apps, in order of importance

Install and verify all of these at home, on your normal SIM, before departure. They all want SMS codes.

• Alipay. The primary payment rail, better English than the alternative, and DiDi is built into it. Register, upload your passport, bind your cards.
• WeChat. Necessary as a messaging app whether or not you use it to pay, because Chinese businesses, guesthouses and drivers communicate through it. Also your payment fallback. New foreign accounts sometimes need an existing user to vouch for you, so find that out well in advance.
• DiDi. Ride-hailing, covered in its own section below.
• Amap Global. The English build of China’s main mapping and navigation app. Live navigation, transit directions and points of interest, all in English, working without a VPN. Explicitly not Baidu Maps, which is frequently recommended on the grounds that it works without a VPN. True, but it has never shipped an English interface, and Amap does both.
• Organic Maps or another offline map. Downloads the whole country, works with no signal, no account and no VPN, with English labels from OpenStreetMap data. This is what you will actually use walking around an old town.
• Trip.com. Hotels and, usefully, trains. Works behind the Firewall without a VPN.
• 12306. The official China Railway app and website. Register early even if you intend to book elsewhere.
• Your phone’s offline translation packs. Download both Simplified and Traditional Chinese if your route includes Taiwan or Hong Kong. Simplified alone covers the mainland and leaves you short everywhere else. Turn on the setting that forces translation to run offline.

Money: how paying actually works

Two different things happen at a counter, and knowing which in advance is most of the battle.

They scan you. Supermarkets, chains, convenience stores, anywhere with a staffed till. Open Alipay, tap Pay, and it shows a barcode. Hold it up, the cashier scans it with their gun, and you enter nothing at all because the till already has the amount. The code refreshes about every minute.

You scan them. Street food, markets, small vendors, some taxis. Open Alipay, tap Scan, point at their printed code, and then you type the amount yourself, confirm, and show them the confirmation screen, which serves as the receipt.

The tell is simple. If the code is printed and stuck to something, you scan it. If a person is holding a scanner, they scan you.

As of 2026 both major wallets accept foreign Visa, Mastercard, JCB and others, with the old barriers largely gone. Reported limits are a per-transaction ceiling around five thousand dollars and a rolling annual cap around fifty thousand, which is far more headroom than a traveller needs. On fees, transactions at or below two hundred yuan are free, and above that a roughly three per cent cross-border fee applies. Passport verification is largely automated now and usually takes minutes rather than days.

Two pieces of setup advice that are not obvious.

Call your bank before you bind a card. Binding triggers a small verification charge from the payment platform, which for most European cards is a first-ever Chinese-merchant transaction and exactly the profile that trips an automatic block. Tell them the dates and ask them to enable international online purchases.

Bind all your cards in both wallets, but set a different default in each. This is the least obvious rule here and it is worth reading twice. If both wallets draw on the same card, one issuer-level block takes out both simultaneously, and an issuer block is the most common payment failure foreigners hit in China. Two apps on one card is one point of failure wearing two icons. Different defaults give you a genuine second route: card blocked, switch apps, different issuer, payment goes through.

The traps that cost people money

The personal QR trap. A foreign card can pay merchants. It generally cannot do person-to-person transfers. Small operators often display a personal collection code that looks identical to a business one, frequently on their own phone rather than printed. Foreign cards fail on these, and the transfer carries no buyer protection if it does go through. You will meet this with boatmen, guesthouse extras, market stalls and hired drivers. The fix, in order: ask them to scan your code instead, ask for the business QR, or pay cash. A printed laminated code fixed to a wall is almost always a business one.

The phrase is worth saving on your phone: 有商家收款码吗？ Yǒu shāngjiā shōukuǎnmǎ ma? Do you have a business QR code?

The VPN conflict. Your VPN says you are in Sweden, your GPS says Chongqing, and the payment is declined. This is the single most common reason a payment fails, and the easiest to forget because you turned the VPN on for Gmail an hour earlier. Fully quit the VPN before paying, meaning the icon leaves the status bar, not merely disconnected. Practise the toggle before you need it in a queue.

The two wallets are not independent backups. They fail together when the card is blocked, when the VPN is on, when the phone is lost, or when the vendor shows a personal code. The real third leg is cash, two or three hundred yuan in tens and twenties, at all times. Not only hundred-yuan notes.

Apple Pay is close to useless on the mainland. It runs on the UnionPay channel, which most small vendors do not use. A card can still be valuable as a number inside Alipay, but do not plan on tapping your phone at a till the way you would at home.

Losing your phone is the failure that cannot be fixed locally. Every wallet, account and verification code is bound to your number. Think this through in advance: a second device that can get online independently, credentials in a password manager on more than one device, and message forwarding set up so codes reach you if the primary phone dies. A travel eSIM is a thirty-five dollar consumable you can simply buy again. A home SIM often is not replaceable from abroad at all.

Trains: the fifteen-day window

China’s high-speed rail is the best way to move around the country and the part of the trip that most needs planning.

Tickets go on sale fifteen days before departure, at a fixed time, and popular routes sell out the same day. Conventional, non-high-speed services often open later, sometimes only on the day of travel. This single rule shapes a long trip: on a six-week itinerary a third of your travel has to be booked while you are already travelling, at specific hours, from wherever you happen to be.

Your passport is the ticket. You scan it at the gate, and there is no paper to lose. Foreign passports occasionally need the staffed window instead of the automatic gate, so allow buffer at your first departure.

Where to buy. Two real options.

12306 is the official channel. It is the only one with the waitlist, which automatically buys you a seat from cancellations when a train has sold out. Agents cannot do that; their remedy is to cancel and rebook a different train. You can also change or refund tickets yourself at any station window. Register your account well in advance. Verification is usually quick, though note the mobile number field only accepts mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan numbers, so a European number has nowhere to go.

Trip.com is an authorised agent with the same inventory, a foreign-card checkout that reliably works, and it functions behind the Firewall without a VPN. It charges roughly ten to thirty yuan a ticket. The refund schedule is China Railway’s own and identical on both channels: free at eight or more days out, five per cent between two and seven days, ten per cent inside forty-eight hours, twenty per cent inside twenty-four.

My conclusion after working through it: use Trip.com for convenience on ordinary legs, keep the 12306 account for the contested ones. For a date where a specific train genuinely matters, try 12306 the moment the window opens, and fall back to Trip.com minutes later if it fails. Booking both channels for the same train is blocked anyway, since one ID gets one ticket per train per date.

Two cautions. Trip.com’s sixty-day advance reservation is a pre-order queued to an agent, not a ticket, and it can feel like you have booked when you have not. And for small stations on conventional lines, check the official timetable regardless of where you buy, because agent search does not reliably surface the full service list.

Station names will catch you out. Chinese cities routinely have several stations, and high-speed and conventional services often use different ones, sometimes far apart. A city’s main station and its South or West station can be an hour from each other. Worse, similar names exist in different provinces entirely. Confirm the characters, not just the romanisation.

Hotels: what to book and where

The good news, and it genuinely changes how you plan: accommodation inventory in China is enormous. Outside a national holiday you can book a decent room in a large city days or hours ahead. This is the opposite of the train situation and it should absorb the opposite amount of worry.

Trip.com has the deepest Chinese inventory and lists domestic chains that Western sites often miss. Booking.com works and is worth having for the cancellation terms and the familiar interface. Prices are broadly comparable; availability is not, and Trip.com wins on smaller cities.

Three things to check on every booking.

• Foreign guests. Not every Chinese hotel is registered to accept them. This is much less of a problem than it was, but it is still real in smaller towns, and the listing does not always make it obvious. Where it matters, confirm directly.
• The name on the booking. It must match the passport you will present, in the machine-readable form. Hotels register foreign guests with the police, and that registration keys on the passport string.
• Cancellation deadlines with times attached. Chinese hotel bookings often have a free-cancellation cutoff at a specific hour on a specific day, not merely a date. Put these in your deadline list.

For location, the rule that has never failed me: pick walkable to what you came for, and near a metro station. Room quality matters far less than a four-minute walk to the line that takes you everywhere.

DiDi, explained properly

DiDi is China’s ride-hailing app, the local equivalent of Uber, and it is one of the genuinely excellent things about travelling there.

The international version runs in English. You set your destination in the app, and it is transmitted to the driver in Chinese, so you never type or pronounce a character. In-app chat translates automatically. This removes the single biggest friction of taxis in a country whose language you do not read.

Payment. As of 2026 international Visa, Mastercard and others are supported, though acceptance still varies by card and issuer, so test it at home rather than at an airport at midnight. DiDi is also built into Alipay, which is a second route if the standalone app refuses your card.

Which tier. Express covers essentially every trip a visitor makes, and typically runs ten to twenty per cent below metered taxi fares. Coverage extends to several hundred cities and thins out only in genuinely small places. In rural areas, expect to arrange rides through your guesthouse instead, which works well.

Two practical notes. Pay inside DiDi, and do not scan a driver’s personal QR unless the app itself tells you payment failed, or you will pay twice. And in tourist towns where the old centre restricts vehicles, DiDi will drop you at a perimeter car park and you walk in, which is worth knowing before you book a ride with luggage at nine in the evening.

DiDi also solves a specific problem: the airport arrival that lands after the trains and airport express have stopped. Knowing you have a working ride-hailing app removes the need to negotiate anything at midnight.

ATMs and cash

Despite the wallets, carry cash. Rural guesthouses, village markets and night-market stalls are cash economies, and the wallets fail together in the ways described above.

Use a card with no foreign transaction fee and no withdrawal fee. That removes your own bank’s charges. It does not remove the Chinese operator’s fee, typically fifteen to twenty-five yuan, which is why the bank brand still matters. ICBC, Bank of China and China Construction Bank are the reliable choices; avoid standalone machines in shopping arcades.

Always decline conversion. When the machine offers to charge you in your home currency, say no and take the yuan rate. Accepting costs three to five per cent every time.

Per-transaction limits run around two to three thousand yuan. Plan withdrawals before cash-scarce stretches rather than expecting to solve it on arrival: pull enough in a major city before heading into rural areas, where ATMs are sparse and may not accept foreign cards at all.

Hong Kong and Taiwan are different countries for this purpose. Hong Kong runs on the Octopus card and contactless payment. Taiwan runs on cash, the EasyCard, and contactless cards, which it accepts far better than the mainland does. In Taiwan the ATMs inside 7-Eleven stores are everywhere, cheap and open all night.

Holidays that will ruin your week

Two national holidays dominate the autumn and both affect transport and crowding severely.

Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls in late September and moves with the lunar calendar. National Day Golden Week, the first week of October, which is one of the largest human migrations on earth. If your route crosses either, book the trains that matter well ahead and expect major sites to be at capacity.

Taiwan has its own, Double Ten in mid-October, which can extend into a three-day weekend and fills the east coast.

None of this is a reason to avoid autumn, which has the best weather of the year. It is a reason to know the dates before you fix the route.

Food, if you cannot take heat

I have a medical reason to avoid spice, so I researched this harder than most people need to. The short version: China is very manageable, but the regional variation is enormous and the reputation of a cuisine tells you what to expect.

Shanghai and Cantonese food, including Hong Kong and Shenzhen, are mild by default and need no special ordering. Taiwan likewise. Sichuan, meaning Chengdu and Chongqing, and Hunan, meaning Changsha and Zhangjiajie, are genuinely fiery and require you to say so clearly. Guizhou combines heat with sourness.

Reliable safe choices almost everywhere: dumplings, steamed buns, xiaolongbao, clear noodle soups with the ingredients visible on top, steamed fish, plain rice and vegetables.

The phrase to save on your phone, with the characters, is 我不能吃辣，请不要放辣椒 (Wǒ bù néng chī là, qǐng bù yào fàng là jiāo), I cannot eat spicy food, please do not add chili. The short version is 不要辣 (Bù yào là). In Sichuan and Chongqing, stronger: 一点辣都不要 (Yī diǎn là dōu bù yào), not even a little.

Show the characters rather than attempting the tones. It works far better.

Power, plugs and charging

Mainland China is 220 volts and sockets take the flat two-pin American plug directly, as well as the local three-pin type. Hong Kong is 220 volts on the British three-pin. Taiwan is 110 volts on American plugs.

A single adapter with interchangeable American and British heads covers the entire region. Check that every charger reads 100 to 240 volts, which Apple equipment always does, but camera battery chargers sometimes do not, and that is the one item that is expensive and not easily replaced in a small town.

Trains have sockets, though older stock can be sparse and they cluster at window seats. Assume power, do not depend on it.

The thing that catches people is not voltage but socket count. One adapter body means one socket at a time, and a budget guesthouse may offer exactly one reachable outlet for a laptop, two phones, a watch and camera batteries. A small multi-port charger solves an evening of queuing devices.

How AI helps with all this

Almost everything above came out of a planning process I ran with an AI assistant, and it is worth being specific about which parts it was good for.

The tedious layer. Plug types, ATM fee structures, holiday dates, spice phrases with characters, visa lead times. This is genuinely dull work and there is a lot of it. An assistant does it in an evening, and the result is the difference between a smooth first week and a fraught one.

Holding the whole thing at once. “If Mid-Autumn falls on the 25th, what does that do to the trains I have not booked yet” touches the route, three legs and two hotel deadlines simultaneously. That is the kind of question no guidebook is organised to answer.

Keeping a written record. I keep the plan as plain text files in a folder on my own machine, and the assistant reads and writes them directly. That means a decision made in July is still there in September, with its reasoning, rather than buried in a chat history. This matters more than any single fact it found. I have written about the method separately.

Reading booking sites directly. This is the newer capability and it changed the research work. Claude has a browser built into it, so instead of me describing what I found on Trip.com, it opens the page itself, reads the actual listings, and comes back with what is available. I have used it to compare hotels on a specific street against my constraints, walkable to a metro line, above a rating threshold, under a price ceiling, and to check what trains actually run a route rather than assuming a plausible-sounding service exists. The verification is the valuable half. A model working from memory will invent a train with the right shape; one reading the timetable will not.

It still does not book anything. It should not, and I would not want it to. Payment details, logins and irreversible clicks stay with me. What it does is get me to the point where booking is a two-minute job I already know the answer to.

Where it was wrong. An adversarial check of my own plan turned up a scenic railway line that does not exist, a station name that was wrong, a metro direction reversed, and a fifty-kilometre day described as gentle. Every one was specific, plausible and false. Ask for every checkable claim to be marked verified or assumed, then read the assumed list. That is the habit that makes the rest of it safe.

None of this is difficult. It is simply unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things are best dealt with at a kitchen table rather than at a ticket counter with a queue behind you.

Do the setup at home. Carry cash. Check the station name twice.