China is a continent with a government. The difference between a trip you describe for years and one you spend in terminals is not budget — it is sequencing. Here is how we route nine real journeys, what fits in seven, ten or fourteen days, and which months to be where.
No coach, no forty strangers, no 6am start you did not agree to, and no shop that has paid for its place in the day.
The word gets used loosely, so here is the specific version. One vehicle with a licensed driver who is yours for the day. One English-speaking guide or butler who stays with your party across cities rather than being swapped at every border. A schedule that bends when you are tired, when the light is good, or when a restaurant you liked deserves a second visit. Timed museum entries booked under your names weeks ahead, because the good ones cannot be bought at the gate on the day.
What it does not automatically mean is luxury. A private tour with a bad planner is a comfortable car driving you to the wrong things at the wrong hours. The value is in the routing decisions — which wall section, which morning, which city you skip — and those are made long before you are in the vehicle.
It is not the language barrier, and it is not the apps. It is distance. Beijing to Xi'an is 1,200 kilometres. Xi'an to Shanghai is 1,500. Guilin sits 1,700 south of Beijing. People build six cities into nine days because the places are famous, and then discover that every intercity move costs half a day once you add the transfer, the security queue and the arrival. Two anchor bases with day trips out will feel like a longer holiday than four cities made of arrivals.
So we start from the calendar and the geography, not the bucket list. Once the shape is right, the bucket list slots itself in — usually with room left over.
None of these is a fixed departure with a bus behind it. Each is a shape we start from and redraw around your dates, your party and your pace.
The default for a first visit, and for good reason: three cities that could not be more different, joined by two short rail legs and one flight. Imperial architecture, the terracotta army, then the world's most efficient skyline. Nine days is comfortable; seven is rushed but doable if you accept one big day.
Adds the part of China that photographs badly because no photograph gets it right: the Li River karst towering over rice paddies and bamboo rafts. The southern leg changes the tempo of the whole trip — after eleven days of museums and monuments, you spend three days on a bicycle in a valley.
Yunnan is the most ethnically varied province in China and the one people extend their trip for. Naxi courtyard towns, Bai markets, Tibetan monasteries and Hani terraces, all within a few hundred kilometres. We run it with two or three bases rather than eight hotels, because the alternative is four hours of road a day that nobody remembers.
Most itineraries give Xi'an one rushed day between Beijing and Chengdu. Given five, it becomes a different trip: the warriors before the coach parties, the full wall circuit at dusk, noodle kitchens in the lanes behind the main drag, the granite pillars of Huashan, and panda habitat in the Qinling foothills.
The Yangtze delta does the country's most underrated low-key travelling: canal towns that predate Venice's trade routes, classical gardens, tea mountains, and the Yellow Mountain granite that every Chinese painter has copied at least once. Short transfers, gentle pace, excellent hotels.
The fastest-moving part of China. Cantonese food culture, the hardware and manufacturing ecosystem that makes Shenzhen worth a working visit, then Portuguese-Italian Macau for dessert. Popular for business-plus-pleasure trips and for families with older children who want to see what the country is becoming rather than what it was.
The long one, and the one that converts people. Grotto libraries in the desert, a Uyghur city that feels a world away from the coast, and the empty kilometres between. It needs time and a tolerance for long driving days; we build it with domestic flights replacing the worst of the rail legs. Prepared to order rather than run as a fixed departure.
Sichuan is the country's food capital and the panda capital, and the Yangtze gorges are the reason people used to come to China at all. Done properly it is a slow-travelling route: a private car through the basin, then three nights on the water between Chongqing and Yichang.
Tibet is permit-gated, altitude-governed and not a spontaneous add-on, which is exactly why it works as a private journey rather than a bus tour. We handle the permits, build acclimatisation into the sequence, and put oxygen in the vehicle. It is the trip people describe years later.
Every plan we send has these columns: what happens, when it happens, and what we deliberately left out so the day does not collapse.
Land in Beijing, private transfer, check-in near the hutongs. Deliberately nothing scheduled — jet lag decides the day.
The 6am start you chose: Temple of Heaven with the tai chi crowds before the gates open to tour groups, then the Forbidden City on the pre-opening slot.
Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, reached before the coach parties, with the cable car up and the slide-tube down. Back through the Summer Palace at dusk.
A rickshaw loop through the drum-tower lanes and a noodle lunch with a local family, then the afternoon high-speed train to Xi'an.
The pits at opening time with a guide who has read the excavation reports, the Shaanxi history museum, then the Muslim Quarter kitchens after dark.
Bike the full 13.7km circuit on top of the city wall, then fly to Guilin and take the boat down to Yangshuo.
Li River to Xingping for the scenery on the twenty-yuan note, cycling the paddy lanes behind West Street, a bamboo raft on the Yulong at sunset.
Sunrise from Taohua Yuan, an unscheduled morning, then the flight to Shanghai.
Art-deco walk through the French Concession, Jing'an, the Bund at blue hour, and a rooftop dinner facing the skyline.
Pearl market or nothing at all, then the airport transfer with a name board and a driver who already has your flight number.
Beijing. Nothing planned.
Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City, the wall at Mutianyu pushed to a very early start or dropped in favour of the Summer Palace.
Morning rickshaw loop, afternoon rail to Xi'an, evening wall cycle.
Warriors at opening, museum, Muslim Quarter dinner.
Morning in Xi'an, flight to Shanghai, the Bund at dusk.
French Concession, Yu Garden, Jing'an, a tea house in the old town.
Water-town half-day at Zhujiajiao if the flight is late, otherwise straight to the airport.
As the ten-day plan, but with the capital museum or the Ming tombs instead of a second wall day.
Rail in, warriors, wall, kitchens.
Boat down the Li, two nights in Yangshuo, raft, caves, cycling.
Fly to Kunming, up to Dali on the lake, Lijiang's old town and the Naxi villages, Yulong雪山 with an early start.
Lijiang to Shanghai, evening on the Bund.
Slow morning, airport.
Shangri-La can be snowing while Hainan is swimming weather in the same week. Plan by region, not by country.
April to May and September to October. Spring is dry and bright; autumn has the clearest mountain light of the year. July and August are genuinely hot and the wall crowds peak. Winter is cold, grey, empty and cheap — snow on the city wall is the best photograph in Xi'an and it comes with no queue.
Almost always. Yunnan's climate is the reason it is called the spring city province; October to April is dry, blue-skied and mild. Shangri-La is a different world in winter. Avoid the first week of October and the Spring Festival week, when domestic travel swamps everything.
April to October for the water — the Li River is at its best after rain and the paddies are green. But June to August is hot, humid and typhoon-adjacent. October and November are dry, warm and clear, and the rice is gold. Winter is mild, damp and almost empty.
March to May and October to November. Plum-rain season in June is grey and sticky; July to September is the typhoon window, which can move a flight. Winter is damp cold without central heating, which surprises people who read 'mild' on a chart.
This is where a China-based agency earns its place. Not the sights — the logistics underneath them.
A private China itinerary is quoted per party, not per seat, because the price moves with your dates, your hotel level and how much of the trip is on the move. Send us the shape and you get a real number rather than a guess.
Ten is the honest answer, and it is the length most of our first-visit itineraries end up at. Seven days buys you three cities and a lot of airports; ten buys you three cities and actual time in them; fourteen lets you add the south and stop feeling like you are being moved around. If you only have a week, cut a city rather than shortening each one.
Yes, and that is the classic route. The sequencing matters more than the list: fly into Beijing, rail out to Xi'an, fly to Guilin for the river, fly out to Shanghai and leave from there. That order never backtracks and keeps every long leg in the air and every short one on the ground. The reverse order works too if your international flights are fixed.
Booking too many cities. China is a continent with a government; the distances between the famous places are comparable to flying across Europe, and every transfer costs half a day. People build six cities into nine days and spend the trip in terminals. Two anchor bases with day trips out will feel like a longer holiday than four cities with nothing but arrivals.
Not always, and we would rather say so than pretend. What you are buying is the coordination: timed museum reservations that individuals cannot get, a driver and vehicle on standby at every site, one person accountable for the whole sequence, and someone to sort out a missed rail connection at 9pm. For solo travellers on flexible itineraries the arithmetic can favour DIY. For anyone travelling with parents, with children, or with a short calendar, it usually does not.
Three to four months for travel in the good seasons, and six if it touches October, the Spring Festival or July. The binding constraints are timed-entry museum reservations and hotel inventory in small towns like Ping'an on the Longji ridge, both of which sell out. A last-minute China trip is possible but it will be a narrower one.
The first week of October and the Spring Festival week in January or February, which between them move close to a billion people and fill every train, attraction and hotel in the country. The May Day weekend is the same problem in miniature. If those dates are the only ones you have, we reroute towards quieter regions rather than pretending the crowds are not there.
Yes, and it is easier than in most countries once it is written down. Sichuan and Cantonese kitchens are both adaptable, vegetarian Buddhist restaurants are genuinely good, and hotels with lifts, step-free entrances and western bathrooms exist in every city we work in. Tell us at the brief stage and it becomes part of the plan rather than a conversation you have at the table.
Both. Private is what this page is about and where our attention is. We also run fixed-departure group tours, which suit solo travellers who want a set date and a lower cost. If a group departure matches your dates, we will tell you that it is the better answer rather than talking you into a private car you do not need.
Ten days in October, two of us, parents in their seventies, want the wall and the karst but not the crowds — that sentence is enough to start from. First consultation is free and carries no obligation to book.
Whether you already have flight dates or just a sentence — “first trip to China, ten days, with my parents” — that is enough for a first pass at a route.
