China Travel Guide 2026: Tips for First-Time Travelers

China runs on a phone. Get connected, get paying and get your passport habit right, and everything else about travelling here is easier than its reputation suggests. This is the whole setup, in the order you'll need it.

Almost everything that goes wrong on a first trip to China traces back to the same root cause: arriving without a working phone. Not because the country is hard to travel, but because it has moved further onto mobile than anywhere else on earth. Sort connectivity and payments and the rest falls into place quickly.

Here’s the setup, roughly in the order you’ll need it.

Getting online

A local SIM card

The most reliable option, and you can do it in the arrivals hall. Bring your passport, ask for a tourist package, and you’ll walk out with a Chinese number and a couple of weeks of data.

Three carriers cover the country — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. Coverage is broadly comparable; China Mobile has the largest network and the fewest dead spots in remote areas. Prices are low by any international standard.

The reason a local number matters more than the data: a great many Chinese apps verify by SMS, and a lot of them will only send that code to a +86 number.

An eSIM instead

An eSIM gets you online the moment you land, with no counter and no queue, which is why plenty of travellers start there. Install and activate it before you fly — several eSIM providers’ sites and app downloads are awkward or blocked from inside China, and sorting it out after arrival is a bad first hour.

The trade-off is the phone number. Most travel eSIMs are data-only, so app sign-ups that insist on an SMS code may stall. Some let you route the code to your home number; some apps refuse it. If you’re staying more than a week or two, get a local SIM as well.

Which to pick

Short trip, mostly big cities, you only need maps and messaging? An eSIM is fine on its own. Longer trip, or anywhere off the standard route, or you want to register for bike-share and delivery apps? Get the local SIM. If you’re heading for rural China, treat it as mandatory — the countryside is more phone-dependent than the cities, not less, and you won’t find a carrier shop out there.

Full detail on what’s blocked and how people work around it is in our internet and VPN guide.

Booking somewhere to sleep

Use a platform that speaks your language and knows which properties will take you. The large international travel agencies aimed at China have far deeper inventory in second- and third-tier cities than the Western booking sites do, and they sell flights and train tickets alongside hotels, which makes it easy to build a whole trip in one place.

If you read Chinese, the domestic apps (Qunar, Ctrip’s Chinese front end, Meituan’s hotel tab) are often a little cheaper and list small guesthouses the international versions never show.

The one thing to watch: not every hotel is set up to check in foreign guests, especially in smaller cities. Booking through an international platform filters for properties that are, which saves you an argument at a front desk at 11pm. We wrote up the whole regulation and how it’s actually applied in foreigner-only hotels.

The apps that do the work

The full app guide goes deeper, but this is the working minimum:

WeChat — messaging, payments, and a few million mini-programs sitting inside it. Restaurants take orders through it, hotels answer questions through it, drivers send you their location through it. If you install one thing, install this.

Alipay — the other payment rail, accepted everywhere WeChat is and slightly friendlier to foreign cards. Most people run both.

Amap or Baidu Maps — accurate, current, and integrated with transit and ride-hailing. Google Maps’ China data is years stale; don’t rely on it.

DiDi — ride-hailing, works like Uber, available in every city and most county towns.

Meituan / Ele.me — food delivery, and much more than food. Worth having by day four, when you don’t want to leave the hotel.

A translation app — Google Translate handles text, voice and photos but needs a way around the firewall; Pleco works unimpeded and is the better dictionary if you’re actually trying to learn something.

Paying for things

China is effectively cashless. Street stalls, temple donation boxes, taxis, market vendors — all QR codes.

Mobile payment is the default. Both WeChat Pay and Alipay now link foreign credit cards, and both work by scanning a code or showing yours. Set this up on day one; ideally before you fly.

Cards and cash are the backup. International cards work at large hotels, malls, supermarkets and upmarket restaurants, and essentially nowhere else. Cash is still legal tender and still accepted, but vendors increasingly can’t break a large note. Carry a few hundred yuan for the day your phone dies, and don’t plan around it.

The payments guide covers card linking, transaction limits and what to do when a QR scan fails.

Getting around

China’s transport network is the best argument for its own competence.

High-speed rail connects nearly every city worth visiting, and for anything under about five hours it beats flying door-to-door. Every ticket has an assigned seat. Book through an English-language platform or the official 12306 app, and at most major stations you can board on your passport alone — no printed ticket.

Long-distance buses fill in everywhere the rail doesn’t reach, which is most of the interesting countryside. There’s no single national booking system: some routes appear on the big travel platforms, many cities run their own WeChat mini-program, and plenty of tickets are still sold at the station window an hour before departure. For remote routes, ask your guesthouse — shared minivans and informal carpools are how locals actually move, and they rarely appear online.

In cities, DiDi covers the gaps between metro lines, and shared bikes cover the gaps between everything else. Unlock them with WeChat or Alipay; registration occasionally wants a passport photo.

Eating

The best part, and the part most under-planned. Chinese food is not a cuisine, it’s a category the size of Europe’s — our regional food guide goes province by province. The rough geography:

North — wheat country. Dumplings, hand-pulled noodles, steamed buns, vinegar.
South — rice and rice noodles, lighter seasoning, more vegetables.
Sichuan and Chongqing — chilli and Sichuan pepper, hotpot as a social institution.
Fujian and Guangdong — seafood, clean flavours, tea culture, dim sum.
Yangtze delta — slightly sweet, braised, river fish.
Tibet — barley, yak butter, dairy; heavy food for thin air.
Xinjiang — Central Asian. Lamb, cumin, naan, pilaf, hand-pulled noodles.

Vegetarians do fine. Aubergine in garlic sauce, tomato and egg, stir-fried greens, half a dozen tofu preparations — every menu in the country has plant-based options, and they’re not compromises.

Vegans do nearly as well, with roasted sweet potatoes from a street cart, tofu, bean sprouts, vegetable stir-fries and noodle bowls.

Halal food is widespread. Look for Lanzhou beef noodle shops, Xinjiang restaurants and Hui Muslim canteens — they’re in every city, usually with green signage and Arabic script.

⚠️ If you have coeliac disease or a wheat allergy, be careful: soy sauce is in almost everything and usually contains wheat, and kaofu (烤麸) — a spongy wheat gluten — turns up in supposedly vegetarian dishes. Write your restriction out in Chinese and show it rather than describing it.

Good to know

The small stuff that catches people out:

Chinese cities are enormous and mostly walkable — bring shoes that can do 15,000 steps a day
Carry tissues; public toilets frequently have none, and many are squat-style
Tipping isn’t customary and can create awkwardness rather than goodwill
Power banks on domestic flights need a visible CCC certification mark, or security will take them
Carry your passport every day. Trains, planes, museums, temples and most ticketed sites check it — a photo on your phone won’t do

The five most common mistakes

Landing with no translation app installed
Not setting up the eSIM before arrival, when it’s still easy
Skipping the local SIM and then failing app verification for a week
Leaving the passport in the hotel safe on a travel day
Assuming a foreign credit card will cover you outside big-city hotels

China Travel Guide 2026: What First-Timers Need to Know