People who have been to China

[Yee236T]

Where do you recommend going and when?

Currently I've just been seeing videos of the Shenzhen skyline and thinking to myself "wow this looks so cool".

I really want to go see China.

We loved the Terracotta Warriors. It blew my mind that they were smashed to bits when they found them and they had to be put back together like the world's biggest jigsaw, and a large proportion of them are still underground to preserve the colours.
Mind boggling, the whole thing.

Did you go down Wangfujing street? lots of delights down there 😁

For me China did not live up to expectations. I found it depressingly polluted - the smog was on another level. The food - I really did not enjoy across the board. Everything tasted either terribly synthetic (breakfast type foods) and the meat is obviously slaughtered differently so tastes unpleasant (to me).

I hated the hawking, spitting, smoking EVERYWHERE and the fact that some of the historic sites have been so insensitivly restored/maintained. The forbidden city was being painted like a Dulux ad.

I have travelled extensively and never left a country before planned date but we cut 5 weeks in China to 4 weeks.

Horses for courses - there are some good bits but thought I would give another perspective.

Now for me, I was underwhelmed. Not so much by the scenery but by the never ending stream of boats and humans. It felt very Disney-esque.

I’ve only been to Shanghai but I loved it

The food is quite challenging to the palate, that’s a fair point from other posters. Eg if you order chicken it won’t be like western chicken, there’s a lot of bone and claw involved. But being forced to try things is good. One of the best things I had was lotus root in honey. The smoking is hard work though, you forget how far we’ve come. Smoking is still permitted in most restaurants

Ah, I wonder if that's down to a difference in timing? It's 30 years since I was there, and it certainly didn't feel Disney-esque to me at the time - it was magical.

If something like this has you ‘creased’ I suggest you need to get out more. Suppose being a bitch comes naturally for some

I understand what you're talking about, I hated the smoking and the spitting! Oh gosh, it was too much. Beijing is so busy, and the large crowds were a bit too much, everywhere I went there were locals trying to sell you stuff, even on the great wall! when you just want to be left alone to look around (they dont understand what browsing means they are expecting you to buy as you're a tourist there). But I did enjoy the historical sights, and I had amazing food. And that's what made my trip to China the most enjoyable. Every country will have its not so good bits, but for some those bits it can be a bit over whelming and not make the trip very enjoyable :(

We went in 2006, so 20 years ago. Good point on the timing.

I live in Shanghai.
I've been here and in another part of China for a number of years.
I'm not Chinese.

My favourite places in China:
Shanghai
Hong Kong
Xiamen
Xi'an
Kunming and Yunnan Province
Tibet (I know)
Nanjing
Suzhou
Beijing

I want to go to:
Chongqing
Urumqi
Kashgar

I’ve been to the Shanghai tennis tournament which was fantastic. We were only there for six days and didn’t venture outside Shanghai but I loved it and would go back like a shot. The politeness to visitors is off the charts.

Shenzhen is really boring.
I went there from Hong Kong for 2 nights.
I was ready to leave after one night.

Shenzhen is a very new city, so there's no real history there.
Not much going on there, apart from shopping, especially electronics and fake designer stuff.

I’m currently in Shanghai (first time) and it’s been a fantastic trip. Just 4 days and took a day trip to Suzhou nearby which was lovely.

Coming from a slightly different baseline as we live in SE Asia already (moved from UK). One noticeable difference to where we live is there is far less English spoken here in China. No problem as translate app helps, but a few basic phrases in Mandarin helped.

Pretty much everything runs through apps like Alipay and DiDi (uber). Metro is super easy to operate and efficient, weather has been great this time of year. T-shirt and jeans/linen trousers in day and a light jacket in the evening.

We’ve been impressed by Shanghai - its cosmopolitan, still traditional in many respects, great food, cultural sightseeing and the people have all been very welcoming and hospitable. No animal cruelty seen, but Shanghai is ‘modern’ from what we’ve seen.

The French concession and Bund areas are great.

Hong Kong as an administrative region of China is still number one for us, we love it all and would happily move there if the right job came up. It’s fantastic all around, but we first visited post-covid and 2019 protests so understand it’s changed a lot since.

Taipei (I know) is also very worth visiting for a few days, with day trips to Shifen and Jiufen.

I’d like to visit Beijing, Xi’an and Chongqing next!

We had a different experience, we went some years before you, no smart phone with a translation app and we went to Beijing and Shanghai. We went to the wall, just caught a local bus albeit we were a bit of a tourist attraction on there (well husbands big nose was) as we were walking around in Beijing , less so Shanghai. I remember watching the national anthem being played on the tv when we were getting ready for dinner. We quite often had no clue what was going on, it was very other worldly, no one in Beijing had jeans on, that stuck out.

so yes agree with you a good lonely planet book and using a translator app would be a lot easier, think it depends on how you like to holiday, we would have understood more with a tour but we did see lots of more day to day things just walking round.

How is safety?

Very safe in terms of personal safety. There's CCTV everywhere and a strong police presence.

OTOH, there's CCTV everywhere and a strong police presence. If you happen to be arrested, good luck getting out and out of the country. It's a very different political situation and social contract.

It’s really safe.

Can anyone on this thread tell me what China is like for someone with coeliac disease who needs to avoid gluten. They’re vegetarian as well just to make it harder?

dd went to Tsinghua university for a bit and she’s keen to go back to China and travel around other parts. She wasn’t coeliac when she was there last time.

It's very safe.
Crime is dealt with swiftly and sometimes harshly.
Police and cameras are always around.

We went with Jules Verne on an organised tour in around 2013, because of the language barrier. They used internal flights to get to most places and a coach sometimes. No trains. We went to

Beijing - The Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace and the Great Wall
Xian - the Terracotta army
Chengdu - the pandas
Guilin river cruise to Wuhan
Yangtse three day river cruise
Shanghai

One of the river cruises started in Chongqing, so we went through it, but didn’t stay there. Everywhere we went, there seemed to be an obligatory factory visit - Jade, pearls, lacquer, silk…They were quite interesting and you didn’t have to buy anything.

It took three weeks. It was exhausting - partly due to the amount of information we had to take in!

We were taken to restaurants, clearly used to Westerners. We did get some odd things to eat like venison tendons, sea cucumbers, etc; but most of the food was about the standard of Chinese restaurants here; but a wider variety of vegetable dishes. I don’t recognise the description of tough chicken of a pp. (I’d spent 20 years eating regularly in China town in London, so was used to what to us, are slightly unusual ingredients.) I only recall one restaurant with a wide range of live wildlife on show to eat! We just didn’t look at it, but a vegetarian in our party was very upset!

I thought it was a great place for a holiday!

I’m often in China for work.

it is very different to anywhere else, just in terms of practicality. Google and WhatsApp don’t work. They might if you have a VPN but not reliably. You can’t pay for stuff with a uk bank card, you need WeChat (which is also unreliable for brits) or cash.

it is hard work travelling alone but with an organised tour you could see some good stuff.

Alipay didn’t let us down. But you can’t just rock up with uk credit cards.

Interesting! we arrived thinking ours wouldn’t work, but I left Shanghai this morning and used both Google Chrome/Maps and WhatsApp daily with no VPN turned on (it continued to work when I turned the VPN on though) but as my SIM card includes abroad data for China (I’m coming from another SE Asia country) we wondered if our abroad data SIM card had a VPN built in.

Couldn't get Netflix or Google Drive to work though, but WhatsApp/Instagram/Google Chrome no problem - was interesting trying to work it all out.

Alipay we found worked best for payment as we linked it to our card (both UK and SE Asia bank card).

We did a DIY trip but can see how an organised tour would take a lot of the planning, navigation and potential stress off your hands.

Hangzhou, harbin, xi’an, chengdu, chongqing, Beijing (of course).