About us
A small team that loves this country — and loves showing it properly.
China Trip Plans is made by travellers who live in China. We spend our free days in the mountains and on night trains, and our working days helping visitors get through their first week here without the usual stress.
Who we are
We are a small group of people who grew up travelling this country: the karst hills of Guangxi, the tea terraces of Yunnan, the Bund at six in the morning, a slow train heading west with the window open. We love these landscapes, and we love the ordinary craft of travelling — timetables, street food, wrong turns, and the conversations that come out of them.
We also live here, which matters more than it sounds. It means we know the things a guidebook printed overseas cannot keep up with: which payment app actually accepts a foreign card this month, what the arrival card looks like right now, which gate at the station you need before dawn, and what to do when the machine refuses your passport.
Why we built this
For years, friends and colleagues arriving from abroad turned up with the same short list of problems. Their card would not link to the payment apps. The taxi app was in Chinese. The ticket machine would not read their passport. Their maps stopped working the moment they landed.
Not one of those problems is difficult. They are simply unfamiliar — and unfamiliar things, on your first day in a country of 1.4 billion people, feel enormous. We kept explaining the same fixes over and over, so eventually we started writing them down properly, step by step, with screenshots and the exact buttons to press.
That collection of notes became China Travel Essentials, and this site grew around it.
Our vision
What we hope to do
The goal is simple: make it easier for visitors to come to China, move around comfortably, and see the place for themselves.
A lot of people build their picture of China from a distance — from headlines, from short clips, from somebody else’s summary. We think a few days on the ground beats all of that. Travellers who make the trip tend to tell us the same thing afterwards: the food, the trains, the mountains and above all the people were nothing like what they had pictured.
If our guides remove enough small obstacles that a few more people make that journey — and go home with a story of their own rather than someone else’s — then this site has done its job.
How we work
Four things we hold ourselves to.
Tested, not copied
Every procedure on this site is one we have walked through ourselves. If we could not make a step work, we say so instead of quietly leaving it out.
Dated, not “evergreen”
Rules, apps and visa policies change here faster than print can follow. Our pages carry the date we last checked them, so you always know how fresh the advice is.
No invented reviews
Our reviews page stays empty until real buyers fill it. We would rather show nothing than write praise for ourselves.
A real person replies
Write to us and someone from the team answers — usually within one working day, and always in plain language.
Get in touch
Questions before you buy, problems with a download, or a correction to something on the site — all welcome. Corrections are genuinely the most useful mail we get.