Kayiwa · · 3 min read
Where you sleep in a Chinese city matters more than what you sleep in. These are big cities with excellent metros and long distances, and the difference between a good base and a bad one is an hour a day and whether you eat well at night.
My China guide gives one line per city. This is the longer version, for the three cities most first trips are built around.
Beijing: inside the second ring road
Stay inside the second ring road, in the hutongs. The second ring traces the line of the old city wall, and almost everything you came to Beijing for sits inside it or just beyond: the Forbidden City, the lakes, the alleys, the duck.
The trade is real. A hutong courtyard room is smaller, older and sometimes colder than a tower room in a business district, and the bathroom may be a surprise. What you get is a neighbourhood that is alive at seven in the morning and still alive at ten at night, and a walk home that is part of the trip rather than a taxi ride after it.
What I would avoid: the far eastern business districts and anything described as convenient for the airport. They are convenient for nothing else, and Beijing is too large to commute across twice a day.
Shanghai: the former French Concession, not the Bund
The Bund is the photograph. It is not the place to sleep. Rooms there are priced for the view, the streets empty out after the evening crowds leave, and you are a long way from the food.
Base yourself in the former French Concession instead. Plane trees, low buildings, lanes you can walk end to end, and the best eating in the city within a few blocks in any direction. Shanghai is the easiest of the three cities to walk, and this is the part that rewards it. You can still see the Bund at night; it is fifteen minutes on the metro, and it looks better when you are not paying to sleep beside it.
Chengdu: close to the centre, and slower
Chengdu is the most relaxed big city in China and the one where a base matters least, which is its own kind of luxury. Stay reasonably central, near a metro line, and the city comes to you: teahouses, hotpot, the parks where people actually sit for an afternoon.
The one thing worth planning around is the pandas. The breeding base is north of the city and best done early, so if that is a fixed point in your trip, a base with a clean run north will buy you an extra hour in bed on the one morning you need it.
Three rules that apply in all three
- Walk to a metro station in under ten minutes. In cities this size the metro is the difference between three things a day and five, and it is cheap, fast and signed in English.
- Check the hotel takes foreign passports before paying. It is a registration system question, not a hospitality one, and it is the most common way a booking goes wrong. I wrote up the whole thing separately: booking a hotel in China as a foreigner.
- Save the address in Chinese. Screenshot it. Drivers do not read pinyin, and your phone will pick the wrong district if you type the English name.
Costs, visas, routes and what to eat are all in the China travel guide.