🛠️ Toolkit

Practical Tools

Everything you need to function in China — from payments to VPN, all in one place.

Quick Jump

⚡Live Tools 💳Money & Payments 📶Internet & SIM 📲Essential Apps 🌃Daily Life Hacks

⚡ Interactive Tools

Plan in seconds

Live tools that do the math for you — convert money, check your transit-visa eligibility, pack smart, and more.

Fetching latest rates…

1 USD ≈ ¥6.77

🇺🇸 Your currency

US Dollar

⇌

🇨🇳 Chinese Yuan (CNY)

Type here to convert in reverse

Quick

What things cost in China

🥟Street breakfast¥15 ≈ 2.22 USD

🚇Subway ride¥5 ≈ 0.74 USD

🍜Noodle lunch¥35 ≈ 5.17 USD

☕Coffee (chain)¥30 ≈ 4.43 USD

🚕Didi, ~5 km¥30 ≈ 4.43 USD

🏨3-star hotel/night¥350 ≈ 51.73 USD

💡 Rates update daily and are for reference only. Your actual rate comes from your bank, Alipay or WeChat Pay, usually with a 0.5%–3% fee or spread.

💳

Money & Payments

China is nearly cashless. Set up mobile payments before you arrive.

🅰️

Alipay (支付宝) — Tour Pass

The most foreigner-friendly payment app. Link an international card via 'Tour Pass'.

How-to

1.Download Alipay from the App Store / Google Play.
2.Sign up with your phone number (international numbers OK).
3.Tap 'Tour Pass' on the home screen.
4.Verify passport + bind your Visa/Mastercard/AmEx.
5.Daily limit ¥6,000, single transaction ¥3,000.

💚

WeChat Pay (微信支付)

Universal in China — chat + pay in one app. Supports foreign cards since 2023.

How-to

1.Download WeChat and register (verification by a Chinese WeChat friend may be requested).
2.Go to Me → Services → Wallet → Bank Cards.
3.Add your international card.
4.Scan merchant QR or show 'Receive Money' QR.

💵

Cash & ATMs

Useful as backup. Major banks (ICBC, BoC, CCB) accept foreign cards. Withdraw at airports first.

Recommended Picks

Bank of China ATMs
Most reliable for foreign cards, ATM fee ~¥25/withdrawal.
ICBC ATMs
Wide network, English interface.
Airport money changers
Decent rates at PEK / PVG / CAN.

📶

Internet & SIM

Get connected on arrival. A travel eSIM is the easiest option for short-term visitors — we point people to Yesim first for China. See our full eSIM comparison for all 6 providers tested.

📱

eSIM (Recommended)

Activate before leaving home. Works on iPhone XS+ and most modern Androids. Some include VPN.

Recommended Picks

Yesim
The one we point to first for China. Plans exit through an overseas gateway, so Google Maps, Gmail, Instagram and WhatsApp work with no VPN. Lowest entry price, unlimited options available, and a built-in VPN layer on iOS. Install by QR code before you fly, activate on landing.
⭐ Top pickYesim
Unlimited data plans for China, overseas gateway, no VPN needed.
Get a Yesim eSIM for China
Affiliate link · no extra cost to you
Airalo
Largest eSIM marketplace, with the widest range of plan lengths and China Unicom 5G. Check the plan covers mainland China, not Hong Kong, China only.
⭐ Top pickAiralo
Largest eSIM marketplace, competitive China plans, overseas gateway.
Get an Airalo eSIM for China
Affiliate link · no extra cost to you
Saily
From the NordVPN team. Connects to all three Chinese carriers for the broadest coverage — the safer pick for remote and mountain areas.
⭐ Top pickSaily
Privacy-first eSIM from NordVPN team, overseas gateway, no VPN needed.
Get a Saily eSIM for China
Affiliate link · no extra cost to you
Holafly
Unlimited data plans, slightly pricier. Hotspot sharing is capped.

📞

Local SIM Card

Cheaper for stays over 2 weeks. Need passport for registration. Doesn't bypass GFW.

Recommended Picks

China Unicom (联通)
Best for foreigners. Airport counters at PEK / PVG / CAN.
China Mobile (移动)
Largest network, rural coverage best.
Tourist SIM at airport
Pre-packaged 30-day plans, ¥150-300.

🔐

VPN (For Google, Instagram, etc.)

China's firewall blocks Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc. Install VPN BEFORE arriving.

Recommended Picks

Astrill
Most reliable in China but pricey (~$15/month). Real-time obfuscation.
ExpressVPN
Works ~80% of the time, good speeds.
NordVPN
Works but throttled occasionally. Affordable.

📲

Essential Apps

Download these before your flight. Most have English versions.

🚗

DiDi (滴滴)

China's Uber. International version takes foreign credit cards. Cheap & ubiquitous.

🗺️

Maps

Google Maps doesn't work well in China. Use Amap or Baidu Maps. Apple Maps is okay.

Recommended Picks

Amap (高德地图)
Best for navigation, has English mode.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ “AMap Global” has a full English interface — the version most usable for visitors.
Baidu Maps
Locals' favorite. Chinese-only.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ Chinese interface only, but locals' first choice for street-level accuracy.
Apple Maps
Works fine if you're already on iOS.

🌐

Translation

Speech, photo & menu translation will be your daily lifesavers.

Recommended Picks

Google Translate
Needs VPN. Camera mode is gold for menus. Download offline pack.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ Install and download the offline Chinese pack BEFORE you fly — it needs a VPN inside China, but offline mode works without one.
Pleco
Best Chinese dictionary, OCR camera, free.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ Free core dictionary with OCR camera — point it at a menu and it reads the characters. Works fully offline.
Baidu Translate
No VPN needed. Reliable inside China.
Official download App Store Official site
⚠️ Not on Google Play — iOS only, or use the website. No VPN needed inside China.

🍱

Food & Delivery

Order food, find restaurants, book tables.

Recommended Picks

Meituan (美团)
Food delivery + groupon + everything. Mandarin only.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ Chinese interface only. Easier path: use the Meituan mini-program inside Alipay and let your phone translate the screen.
Taobao Shangou (淘宝闪购)
Alibaba's delivery app. Renamed from Ele.me in December 2025; searching the old name redirects here.
Dianping (大众点评)
Yelp equivalent — read reviews before going.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ China's Yelp — read real reviews and photos before you commit to a restaurant.

🚄

Trains & Flights

Book trains, planes, and tickets to attractions.

Recommended Picks

Trip.com
Best for foreigners — English, takes foreign cards, books trains/flights/hotels.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ The practical way for foreigners to book high-speed rail, flights and hotels — full English, foreign cards accepted.
12306
Official train booking. Foreign passport supported now.
Official download App Store Official site
⚠️ The official railway app (China Academy of Railway Sciences). Cheapest, no markup — but the interface is Chinese and foreign cards often fail. Use Trip.com if it gives you trouble.
Klook
Attractions, day tours, transfers.
⭐ Top pickKlook
English-language booking for China tickets and tours; check each product's reservation, ID, redemption and cancellation rules.
Book China tours and tickets on Klook
Affiliate link · no extra cost to you

🛒

Shopping

From dumplings to dragon kites — China's e-commerce is unreal.

Recommended Picks

Taobao
Alibaba's marketplace. Setup requires Alipay binding.
Official download App Store Google Play Official site
⚠️ Developer: Zhejiang Taobao Network. Needs a Chinese delivery address, so it's mainly useful for longer stays.
JD.com
Faster, more legit for electronics.
Pinduoduo / Temu (海外)
Cheap mass-market goods.

🌃

Daily Life Hacks

Small things that make a big difference on the ground.

💧

Drinking Water

Don't drink tap water. Hotels provide kettles for boiling. Bottled water is ¥2-5 everywhere.

🚻

Toilets

Squat toilets are common. Carry tissues + hand sanitizer. Malls and Starbucks have Western toilets.

🏧

Tipping

Not customary in restaurants/taxis. Hotel porters: ¥10-20 if you wish. Service charge often included.

📞

Emergency Numbers

Save these in your phone.

Recommended Picks

110
Police
120
Ambulance
119
Fire
12367
Immigration / NIA hotline (English available)

🎭

Cultural Etiquette

A few quick rules to fit in.

Recommended Picks

Business cards
Hand and receive with both hands. Look at it before pocketing.
Toasts
Hold your glass lower than your elder/senior's when clinking.
Chopsticks
Don't stick them upright in rice — funeral symbolism.
Photos
Ask before photographing people, especially in temples or villages.

Go Deeper: Topic Guides

The above is the quick reference. Each topic also has a full guide covering the details, real prices and the mistakes to avoid.

Paying in ChinaChina is the most cashless large economy on earth. Street vendors, temple donation boxes and 70-year-old fruit sellers all take QR codes, and a growing number of places genuinely cannot make change for a 100-yuan note. The good news is that both Alipay and WeChat Pay now accept foreign credit cards directly, and setup takes about ten minutes. This guide covers what actually works in 2026, in the order you should do it.High-Speed RailChina's high-speed rail network is the largest in the world at over 45,000 kilometres, and for journeys under about 1,200 kilometres it beats flying comprehensively — city centre to city centre, no security theatre, no baggage carousel, and trains that leave on time to an almost absurd degree. Beijing to Shanghai in four and a half hours is genuinely faster door to door than the flight. This guide covers everything a first-time foreign passenger needs.Internet & VPNGetting online is the single most urgent thing you will deal with on arrival in China, because almost everything else depends on it — payments, taxis, maps, translation and train tickets all need a live data connection. It is also the area where the most outdated advice circulates. This guide sets out what works in 2026, what is blocked, and exactly what to arrange before you fly.Taxis & DidiTaxis in China are cheap by international standards — a cross-town trip in Chengdu or Xi'an often costs less than a coffee in London — and Didi has made hailing one almost frictionless, even without Chinese. The main challenges are not cost but communication: telling a driver where you want to go when you cannot pronounce it, and knowing when you are being taken for a longer ride than necessary. Both are solvable.Food DeliveryFood delivery in China operates at a scale and speed that has no equivalent in the West. A meal arrives in under thirty minutes, delivery costs three to six yuan, and the choice includes everything from a two-yuan bowl of noodles to hotel-quality banquet dishes. For a traveller it is genuinely useful — for a late arrival, a rainy evening, or the day you simply cannot face another restaurant menu you cannot read.Chinese Food BasicsThe single biggest misconception about Chinese food is that it is one thing. It is not — the difference between a Cantonese dim sum breakfast and a Chongqing hotpot is greater than the difference between Italian and Swedish cooking. Understanding the regional map is the difference between eating well in China and eating the same three dishes for a fortnight. This guide gives you enough to order confidently anywhere in the country.Safety in ChinaViolent crime against tourists in China is rare enough that most visitors are genuinely surprised by how relaxed cities feel at night. But safe is not the same as risk-free, and the risks here are different from what people expect: your problems will almost certainly be tourist-priced taxis, tea-house scams and traffic, not muggings. This guide separates the real risks from the imagined ones.Hotels & check-inThis is the single most common way a China trip goes wrong on arrival: you book a well-reviewed, cheap hotel online, arrive at 11pm after a long flight, and are told the hotel cannot accept foreign guests. It is not discrimination and it is not negotiable — it is a licensing issue, and it is entirely avoidable if you know what to look for before you book.What to packChina has excellent shops and next-day delivery on almost everything, so a packing list here is not about volume — it is about the short list of items that are genuinely hard to obtain once you land, plus the digital preparation that has to happen before you cross the border rather than after. Get those right and you can travel light.Shopping & tax refundTwo things surprise visitors about shopping in China. The first is that the cheap-manufacturing stereotype is out of date — the interesting purchases now are design objects, tea, silk and electronics accessories, not knock-off handbags. The second is that China runs a departure tax refund scheme for foreign visitors that most tourists never claim, because nobody told them to ask for the right paperwork at the till.Etiquette & customsMost etiquette advice about China is either wildly outdated or so hedged it is useless. The honest version is short: Chinese people are generous to foreign visitors who are visibly trying, almost nothing you do accidentally will cause real offence, and the handful of things that do matter are easy to learn in five minutes. This guide covers those, and skips the folklore.Best time to visitChina is roughly the size of Europe and the United States respectively, so there is no single best month — only the best month for the specific regions you are visiting. That said, two pieces of advice apply to everyone: late spring and early autumn are the reliably good windows nationwide, and there are two specific holiday periods when travelling inside China is genuinely unpleasant no matter where you go.Tiger Leaping Gorge HikeTiger Leaping Gorge ( Hutiaoxia ) is one of the world's deepest river canyons — the Jinsha River crashes 3,900 m below the 5,596 m Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and a 22 km high trail runs along the upper rim. For two days you walk between snow peaks and roaring water, sleeping in Naxi family guesthouses where the food is hot and the gorge views are the reason you came. This is the single best multi-day trek you can do in China without a guide, a permit, or prior booking — and this guide covers the route, the 28 Bends, where to sleep, when to go, and how to get there from Lijiang.Harbin Ice FestivalHarbin in deep winter is the coldest major city in China and the most spectacular, and almost every planning mistake visitors make here comes from the same misconception: that **"the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival" is a place you buy a ticket to**. It is not. It is a season — roughly December to March — under which several separate parks operate on separate sites, with separate tickets, and in two cases with **opposite best hours**: ice is lit from within and needs darkness, snow is white and needs daylight. Get that wrong and you will spend an afternoon looking at grey blocks or an evening photographing invisible sculpture. This guide covers which parks are which, how the opening dates are actually decided, the one week to avoid, what the cold does to your plans beyond clothing, and the two day trips — only one of which is in Harbin at all.Best eSIM for ChinaYou land at Shanghai Pudong. You open Google Maps. If it spins forever, you bought the wrong eSIM — or worse, none at all. Here's which one to get, why it works, and how to set it up in under 3 minutes before your flight.Hot PotIn China, hot pot is not one dish but at least four separate meals that happen to share a name, and each one is ordered differently. A Chongqing beef-tallow pot is about offal, numbing spice and timing; a Beijing copper pot is about thin-sliced lamb and a sesame dip; a Chaoshan beef pot is ordered cut by cut, with each cut cooked for a different length of time; and the one-person pot chains are a fourth format altogether. The first decision, which kind of pot you are sitting in front of, shapes everything that follows: what to order, how long to cook it, what goes in your dipping bowl and how the bill is built. This guide explains the four styles, the charges that appear outside the dish prices, and the table habits that locals rarely think to mention.How to Order FoodMost English-language advice on eating in China still tells you to point at the menu, but in Chinese cities the most common way to order is now to scan a QR code on the table and place the order in a mini-programme on your phone. There may be no paper menu, and no one may come to take your order. That gap, more than the language itself, is where visitors get stuck. In practice you will meet three systems: QR ordering, ordering at a counter, and a waiter with a menu. Smaller cities, older restaurants and family-run places still rely on paper menus or simply talk. This guide explains how to recognise each system in the first few seconds, what to do when the phone route fails, how much to order, and how to handle menus, dietary needs and the bill.Vegetarian, Halal & AllergiesIn Chinese restaurants, the word su, usually translated as vegetarian, does not mean what most vegetarians expect. A su dish is one whose main ingredient is a vegetable; it can still be cooked in lard, finished with chicken stock or seasoned with oyster sauce or dried shrimp, and the cook will not think this needs mentioning. That is a difference in meaning, not an attempt to deceive. Once you understand it, eating vegetarian, halal or with allergies in China becomes workable, but it needs active management, and the management looks different from what works at home. The most effective step is usually choosing the right kind of restaurant rather than repeating instructions in an ordinary one. This guide covers what su means in practice, which dishes hide meat, where halal food really is, how to present allergies in writing, and why gluten-free is the hardest case.Choosing a Great Wall SectionThe Great Wall is not one attraction with one entrance. It is a line across northern China, and the parts you can legally visit are a handful of separate parks, each with its own ticket, its own opening hours, its own transport problem and its own management authority — one of the four sections most often recommended from Beijing is not even in Beijing. So the useful question is never whether to see the Great Wall but which section, and the honest answer depends on how much of a day you have, whether you have a car, how many uneven stone steps your knees will accept, and what photograph you want to come home with. There is also one answer that English-language travel writing still gets badly wrong: the wild, unrestored sections that get marketed as the off-the-beaten-path version of this trip sit outside the law in Beijing, and the rules were tightened again in 2026. This guide compares the sections that are open, explains what open legally means and why it changes, and sets out the specific things that will get a visitor fined or detained.

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