China Grand Circuit: From Shanghai's Water Towns to Beijing's Imperial Heart

• Sunrise On The Bund
• None

Clear immigration and baggage reclaim, and your private guide will be waiting outside the arrivals doors. The drive to your hotel near the Bund takes about an hour outside peak traffic; your guide handles check-in and then leaves you alone to unpack, shower and sleep off the flight.

Look for the China Travel board held above the crowd at the exit gate.

• Sunrise On The Bund
• Breakfast, Lunch

The morning opens in Yu Garden, laid out in the 1550s by a Ming official for his ageing parents and now an island of rockery, carp ponds and cloistered walkways inside the old town. The scale is intimate rather than grand — you are never more than a courtyard from the next surprise. Yu Garden shuts on Mondays, and we route the itinerary to avoid it.

The day then shifts into a Shanghai time-travel experience — a walk through the lanes and architecture of the city's 1920s and 1930s heyday, when it was the most cosmopolitan port in Asia. Your guide connects the buildings you see to the stories of the merchants, writers and adventurers who lived in them.

Food is part of the history. You will sample the signature creations of century-old Shanghai brands — the pastries, dumplings and sweets that local families have queued for across four or five generations.

The evening is free, and the Bund is a short walk from your hotel if you want to see the colonial facades lit up after dark.

• Sunrise On The Bund
• Breakfast, Lunch

A day trip west to Suzhou, the city that gave Chinese garden design its vocabulary.

Your first stop is the Master of the Nets Garden, the smallest of Suzhou's great classical gardens and, for many visitors, the most perfect. It is also noticeably quieter than its better-known neighbours — a deliberate choice on our part, and the reason you can actually hear the water in its courtyards.

From Suzhou you continue to Tongli, a water town where the streets are canals and the houses open directly onto the water. A private boat takes you along the main channel (one boat for your party of up to six), past stone bridges, whitewashed walls and the residents going about their day.

You return to Shanghai in the evening. Dinner is your own arrangement.

• Huangshan International Hotel
• Breakfast, Lunch

A morning high-speed train carries you inland from Shanghai to Huangshan, leaving at 9:16 AM and arriving just after noon. Your guide is waiting at the station to take you on to the mountains.

Before you climb, you visit Hongcun, a village of whitewashed houses and dark tiled roofs arranged around a crescent-shaped pond. Its lanes and courtyards are so well preserved that they served as the setting for the opening scenes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Lunch is at a local restaurant in the town below the mountain. The rest of the afternoon is yours to rest and prepare for the climb — an early night is wise, since tomorrow starts on the summit.

• Huangshan Paiyun Hotel
• Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Today takes you up onto the granite ridges of Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the landscape that has driven Chinese ink painting for a thousand years.

The Yungu cable car does the vertical work, lifting you from the valley floor to the ridge line in minutes. From there, a network of stone paths and staircases links the viewpoints.

The centerpiece of the afternoon is the West Sea Grand Canyon, where you walk the first and second loops of a trail cut into the cliff, looking down into a ravine of pine-clad pillars. The route involves sustained stair work; your guide will adjust the distance to your fitness and to the weather.

Tonight you stay at Paiyun Lodge on the mountain itself — the reason this itinerary includes a sunrise you would otherwise miss. Both lunch and dinner are taken at altitude.

• HangZhou ZhongWei Sunny hotel
• Breakfast, Lunch

You are up before first light for sunrise at Beihai, the moment this itinerary was built around. When conditions allow, the peaks emerge one by one from a valley filled with cloud — occasionally with a "sea of clouds" effect that photographers cross the world to capture.

After breakfast at the lodge, you continue on foot to Shixin Peak, whose viewing platform is famous for framing clusters of stone spires against the sky. The Yungu cable car then returns you to the valley.

Lunch is taken at a restaurant below the mountain before your guide transfers you to the station for the late-afternoon train to Hangzhou, departing at 4:21 PM. A Hangzhou guide meets you at the far end and drives you to your hotel near West Lake.

• HangZhou ZhongWei Sunny hotel
• Breakfast, Lunch

A full day in Hangzhou, moving from medicine to tea to the lake itself.

You begin at the Hu Qing Yu Tang Chinese Medicine Museum, housed in a Qing Dynasty pharmacy that once supplied half of southern China. Its carved wooden halls, rows of herb drawers and gilded counter recreate a trade that is still practised today. Closed on Mondays.

Next door is Qinghefang Old Street, a pedestrian lane of traditional shopfronts where you can watch scissors being forged, fans being painted and pastries being fried.

The afternoon belongs to tea. You travel out to a working tea farm in the hills, where the full cycle is hands-on: picking leaves, roasting them in a hot wok, tasting the finished brew and whisking a bowl of powdered tea in the older Song Dynasty style. Lunch is served at the farmhouse, cooked by the family who grow the tea.

You close the day with a boat trip on West Lake, drifting past the causeways, pagodas and willow-lined shores that have made this the most celebrated lake in China.

• Guilin Lijiang Waterfall Hotel
• Breakfast

A morning flight takes you south-west from Hangzhou to Guilin, departing at 10:05 AM and landing at 12:25 PM. The change of scenery is abrupt: within an hour of arrival, the flat delta country has given way to the cone-shaped karst peaks of Guangxi.

A Guilin guide meets you at the airport and takes you directly to the Reed Flute Cave. The cave runs for roughly 240 m through the hill, and the lighting is theatrical — pinks, greens and violets thrown across formations that Chinese visitors have been naming for a thousand years.

You then check in at your hotel beside the Li River, upgraded to a river-view room. Both meals today are your own arrangement — your guide will gladly suggest somewhere local.

• Guilin Lijiang Waterfall Hotel
• Breakfast, Lunch

An hour and a half north-west of Guilin, the Longji rice terraces climb the hillsides in concentric ribbons — carved by hand over some seven centuries by the Zhuang and Yao communities who still farm them.

You head for Ping'an village, where the scenic-area shuttle and a round-trip electric cart do the hard climbing, leaving you free to walk the terraced paths and look out over the valley. Depending on the season, the terraces are flooded mirrors in spring, green steps in summer, or gold in autumn.

The hands-on part of the day comes in the village itself, where a local Zhuang o Yao family teaches you to make bamboo-tube rice — glutinous rice, cured pork and beans packed into a length of fresh bamboo and roasted over an open fire until the bamboo chars and the rice takes on its scent.

Please note the bamboo-rice activity does not include lunch; separate lunch is provided at a local restaurant. You return to Guilin in the evening, with dinner on your own.

• Yangshuo Mountain Retreat
• Breakfast, Lunch

You spend today on the water, aboard a 4-star boat working downstream from Guilin to Yangshuo — the journey that made this river famous long before anyone photographed it.

For four hours or so the boat follows the bends past bamboo groves and buffalo in the shallows, with the cone-shaped peaks that appear on the ¥20 note coming into view mid-river. Keep your camera ready for Nine Horse Mural Hill and Yellow Cloth Shoal, both of which your guide will call out before you reach them.

After disembarking at Yangshuo, you are taken to your riverside retreat on the Yulong River — quieter than the town itself, and ringed by peaks.

The afternoon is given over to the Yangshuo countryside, covered by whichever of the three modes suits you — bicycle, private car or electric scooter. All three take the same quiet lanes out along the Yulong, through paddies and hamlets where the karst hills close in on every side.

• Zhangjiajie Four Points by Sheraton
• Breakfast

A transfer day, and an easy one. Your guide sees you onto the afternoon high-speed train from Guilin, which leaves at 2:55 PM and arrives in Zhangjiajie at 10:14 PM.

The route runs north-east through Guangxi and into Hunan, and the seven hours pass comfortably in first class. A Zhangjiajie guide meets you at the station and takes you to your hotel in the city centre — you will move to the national park area tomorrow.

No meals are included today; there are dining cars on board and restaurants near your hotel.

• Hilton Garden Inn Zhangjiajie Wulingyuan
• Breakfast, Lunch

After breakfast, you enter Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. Its formations are quartz sandstone, eroded into towers rather than the limestone cones you saw in Guangxi — a different geology, and a completely different silhouette on the skyline.

The park pass covers entry, the internal eco-buses, one ride up in the Bailong Sightseeing Elevator and one descent or ascent by Tianzi Mountain cable car. Between them they remove most of the climbing, which matters here: the park is enormous, and distance is measured in staircases.

The Bailong lift is the tallest outdoor elevator anywhere, gaining 326 m of sheer rock in under two minutes with the valley dropping away behind glass. It surfaces at Yuanjiajie, where the Hallelujah Mountains stand in ranks — the same pillars that were digitally lifted into the sky for the film Avatar.

Tip: During peak periods, waiting for the elevator might take up to two hours. Your guide will arrange the schedule to avoid these busy times.

Yuanjiajie is situated in the northern part of Zhangjiajie National Park, famed for its Hallelujah Mountain, named after the floating rocks in Avatar. Capturing the "Number One Bridge Under Heaven" from the "Viewing Bridge Platform" adds to the charm. The afternoon is the ideal time for photographing Yuanjiajie.

Later, the Tianzi Mountain cable car lifts you to a second great vantage point, where on clear days a sea of summits rolls all the way to the horizon. Lunch is served at a restaurant within the park.

In the late afternoon you transfer to your hotel in Wulingyuan, right at the park gate, leaving tomorrow's start short.

• Xi'an Eastern House Boutique Hotel
• Breakfast, Lunch

Your last day in Hunan is the most dramatic, and it ends with a flight west to Xi'an.

You begin at Tianmen Mountain National Park, riding up from the edge of the city by cable car and coming down by park shuttle along the 99-bend road (the order may be reversed on the day, depending on operations). The ticket also includes the summit chairlift and the glass skywalk bolted to the cliff — a walkway where the drop below your feet is measured in hundreds of metres.

You then drive to the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon glass bridge, a 430 m deck slung across a gorge some 300 m deep. The glass panels are thick enough to be reassuring and clear enough that reassurance is tested.

Explore Tianmen Cave, a natural karst arch in the mountain that offers impressive views of the surrounding landscape.

Lunch is taken at a local restaurant before your guide transfers you to the airport for the 7:40 PM flight to Xi'an. You land at 9:10 PM, where a Xi'an guide and driver meet you and take you to your hotel near the Bell Tower.

• Xi'an Eastern House Boutique Hotel
• Breakfast, Lunch

Your guide collects you after breakfast, first for the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and Da Ci'en Temple.

Seven square storeys of Tang brickwork went up in the 7th century to house the 657 Sanskrit scrolls and relics that Xuanzang — the monk whose journey inspired Journey to the West — brought back from India. Climbing to the top gallery is part of your ticket, and repays the effort with a view straight down the city's old axis.

You then drive out to the Terracotta Army at the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum. Three excavation pits are open to visitors, and Pit 1 is the one that stops people in the doorway: a hangar-sized trench of ranked infantry, horses and chariots, buried in the 3rd century BC to accompany the First Emperor into death. The figures were individually finished, which is why the faces differ — and why the production method still divides archaeologists.

The visit is not purely observational. In a traditional cave dwelling (yaodong) near the site, a workshop session shows you how a replica is built up by hand from clay, and you mould a miniature warrior of your own to take away. A full-size replica waits outside for photographs.

Lunch is at a local restaurant; the evening is free.

• Park Plaza Beijing Wangfujing
• Breakfast, Lunch

A morning of quieter, older Xi'an before the train north.

You visit the Xi'an Museum, whose collection traces the city from its days as the Tang capital Chang'an — the largest city on earth in the eighth century. The museum is integrated with the historic Jianfu Temple grounds, so the visit moves between galleries and temple courtyards.

Beside it stands the Small Wild Goose Pagoda, fifteen narrow storeys of Tang brickwork that have leaned gently for centuries and survived earthquakes that flattened everything around them. You are invited to strike the temple bell in the courtyard, a rite performed for good fortune.

Xi'an is one of the few Chinese cities whose Ming walls still stand complete, and you pass them on the way to the station.

Lunch is taken at a local restaurant, then your guide transfers you to the station for the 2:26 PM high-speed train to Beijing, arriving at 6:37 PM. A Beijing guide meets you and drives you to your hotel in Wangfujing.

• Park Plaza Beijing Wangfujing
• Breakfast, Lunch

Your first Beijing morning starts at the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor came each winter solstice to report the year's harvest to heaven. The route takes in the circular Imperial Vault of Heaven, the open marble tiers of the Circular Mound Altar, and finally the blue-tiled Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, the building most people picture when they think of Beijing. A few of the smaller side halls shut on Mondays.

Then it is on to the Wall. The Mutianyu section is the best-restored of the great Ming fortifications and sits about 1.5 hours from the city. Your ticket includes the scenic-area shuttle and a round-trip cable car, so you ride up rather than climb the 40-odd minutes of steps.

At the top you have free time to walk the ramparts in either direction — the stretch between the 14th and 23rd watchtowers is the classic walk. Lunch is at a local restaurant before you return to the city.

• Park Plaza Beijing Wangfujing
• Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Today is the imperial core of Beijing, taken in a deliberately unusual order — starting high, so you can see the whole city before you walk into it.

You begin at Jingshan Park, the hill directly north of the palace, and climb to the Wanchun Pavilion. From there, the golden roofs of the Forbidden City run away south in an unbroken line — the single best view in Beijing, and one most visitors never see because they arrive too late in the day.

Coming down from the hill, you walk through Tian'anmen Square — a paved expanse of 44 hectares, wide enough that the far side looks distant in any weather.

You then enter the Forbidden City through the Meridian Gate, the UNESCO-listed palace complex built in the early 1400s under the Ming Dynasty and home to 24 emperors across five centuries. Your guide reconstructs court life as you pass through the courtyards — the rituals, rivalries and everyday routines of the imperial household.

Lunch is at a local restaurant. In the evening, Peking duck is served for dinner — carved tableside and eaten with pancakes, spring onion and sweet bean sauce, which is the correct way to end a day in the imperial city.

• Park Plaza Beijing Wangfujing
• Breakfast, Lunch

Your last full day begins at the Summer Palace, the court's summer retreat in the north-western hills, built around Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill. The scale is rural rather than palatial — two-thirds of the 290 hectares is water, and the Long Corridor alone runs for 728 m beneath its painted beams. Entry includes a lake crossing by boat and the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity (Dehe Yuan) where the court conducted business. Boats stop running from November to April, and some side halls close on Mondays.

After lunch, the afternoon belongs to the hutongs of the Dongcheng district — the alleyway neighbourhoods of single-storey courtyard houses that survive behind the modern streets.

On this longer route you will visit a local family at home, then try your hand at paper-cutting or Chinese calligraphy with an instructor, and stop at Hong'en Temple, a restored Taoist temple tucked into the lanes.

The day closes with food, and a very Beijing kind: traditional snacks at Huguosi — the old vegetarian and sweet specialities of the capital — followed by imperial palace pastries at Fuhua Zhai, a shop that still makes the small cakes once served inside the Forbidden City.

• Breakfast

According to your departure time, your guide meets you at the hotel and drives you to Beijing Capital or Daxing International Airport for your flight home — bringing your 19-day journey across China to a close.