Sample itinerary · Classic China, 10 days
Your China, on paper.
A sample itinerary is the complete document we send before anyone commits: an overview table, then every day written out — morning, afternoon, evening — with time of day, the kind of table you'll sit down at, the hotel tier you're sleeping in, who is guiding and who is driving, and the one moment each day is built around. This page is that document for the Classic China route — Beijing, Xi'an and Shanghai in ten days — the same document we build for real enquiries, made public so you can read us before you write to us. Yours, rebuilt around your dates and your party, starts with three questions at the start page.
Page one of the document
The overview table
Every proposal we send opens with this: the whole journey on one screen, so the detail that follows has somewhere to hang.
| Day | City | Sleeping | The day's highlight |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beijing (arrive) | Boutique courtyard-style hotel, hutong district | Payments set up and tested over a courtyard dinner |
| 2 | Beijing | Same hotel, night two | The Forbidden City, then the rooftops from Jingshan |
| 3 | Beijing | Same hotel, night three | The Great Wall at Mutianyu, first hour after opening |
| 4 | Beijing → Xi'an | Boutique 4-star inside the old city walls | High-speed rail at 300 km/h; Muslim Quarter by night |
| 5 | Xi'an | Same hotel, night two | The Terracotta Army with real time to look |
| 6 | Xi'an → Shanghai | Boutique 4-star near the Bund | The Bund at dusk, timed backwards from sunset |
| 7 | Shanghai | Same hotel, night two | Yu Garden in the opening hour; French Concession on foot |
| 8 | Shanghai | Same hotel, night three | Zhujiajiao water town while the canals are still cool |
| 9 | Shanghai | Same hotel, night four | Tai chi, a wet market, a cooking class — or a free day |
| 10 | Shanghai (depart) | — | An unhurried send-off, with slack for traffic and tax refund |
Hotel names are confirmed at booking against your dates; the tier — boutique 4-star throughout — is what this price is costed on and never drifts without a requote you approve first.
Pages two to eleven
The ten days, written out
Arrive Beijing — land, exhale, set up
Morning / afternoon: your guide meets you at arrivals with your name in English and pinyin; the driver — a separate role from the guide, so nobody is translating and steering at once — takes you city-side in a car sized for real luggage. No sightseeing is scheduled.
Evening: a courtyard dinner near the hotel at a family-run roast-duck house the neighbourhood actually uses. Over dinner your guide binds payment apps to your card and runs a live test transaction. Peak moment: the first scan-to-pay going through — China unlocks in that second.
Beijing — the Imperial axis
Morning: the Forbidden City at opening, entered through Tiananmen Square, told as a story of emperors and exam candidates. Tickets are real-name and booked at release against your passport details.
Afternoon: up Jingshan hill for 600 years in scale, then a living hutong walked with a long-time resident — neighbours, not souvenir stalls. Lunch is a family-run hand-pulled-noodle kitchen near the Drum Tower, the kind with one menu and a queue.
Evening: free, with a shortlist from us. Peak moment: the golden rooftops grid from Jingshan, suddenly legible as one design.
Beijing — the Great Wall, first
Morning: early departure for Mutianyu. The driver stages to beat the tour buses; you walk in at gate-opening and cable car up to an hour of near-empty wall.
Afternoon: back in the city — the Temple of Heaven in the hour locals use it, card players and all, or the 798 art district. Lunch is a countryside trout-and-vegetable restaurant at the Wall's foot, where drivers and guides eat too.
Evening: a Peking-opera curtain-raiser or an early night; the alarm earned it. Peak moment: 7:50am, an empty ridge going gold in both directions.
West to Xi'an by high-speed rail
Morning: first-class seats on the fast train — city centre to city centre in about four hours. Your big case is sent hotel-to-hotel; you board with an overnight bag while the guide handles platforms and cars.
Afternoon: arrive, check in to a boutique 4-star inside the old walls, decompress.
Evening: the Muslim Quarter on foot — Silk Road heritage eaten, not read: a lamb-skewer grill, a persimmon-cake stall, a hand-beaten noodle counter. Peak moment: the plain turning to loess country at 300 km/h, geography happening through glass.
Xi'an — the Terracotta Army
Morning: the pits with real time — Pit 1's ranks, the generals, the detail no two faces share. The day is built around the site, not around a showroom: there is no showroom in this plan, or any plan.
Afternoon: the Ming city wall by bike in the last of the light.
Evening: a dumpling house where the queue is locals — a dozen fillings, ordered for the table by your guide. Peak moment: the first gasp at Pit 1's scale; no photograph prepares it, including ours.
South to Shanghai — one river, two centuries
Morning: flight east (or rail, if you prefer the ground-level view; we cost both).
Afternoon: check in near the Bund. The whole day is timed backwards from sunset.
Evening: the riverside as the lights come on — the twenty-first century on one bank, the nineteenth on the other — then dinner at a Shanghainese dining room of the red-braised-pork-and-river-fish school. Peak moment: the skyline switching on, because we anchored the day to that minute.
Shanghai — yesterday and today
Morning: Yu Garden and the old town in the opening hour, before the lanes fill — a strategy, not a quirk — ending at an old-town soup-dumpling counter for the first lunch seating.
Afternoon: the French Concession's plane-tree streets on foot: laneway houses, coffee, the Art Deco thread that runs into the Lujiazui skyline.
Evening: free, with our shortlist. Peak moment: Ming pavilion, supertall backdrop — the Shanghai story in one frame, before the crowds arrive.
Shanghai — water and stone
Morning: Zhujiajiao water town while the air is still cool on the canals — stone bridges, tea by the water — a town that rewards the first two hours and punishes the rest, so it's a morning, never an afternoon.
Afternoon: city-side, open by design.
Evening: optional jazz at the Peace Hotel, an institution on the Bund since 1929, with seats we hold once your dates confirm. Peak moment: first light on the canals and nobody on the bridges but a tea-shop owner.
Shanghai, lived — the circuit-breaker day
Morning: tai chi in Fuxing Park with the regulars, then a wet market with your guide — the fish, the tofu man, the season's fruit.
Afternoon: a hands-on cooking class where lunch is what you made. Or scrap the whole day tonight: every good plan has exactly one day you can redesign in real time, with slack for rain, closures and tired knees, and nothing downstream depending on it.
Evening: a rooftop farewell or an early pack. Peak moment: wrapping your own xiaolongbao and having it hold — barely, but hold.
Depart, unhurried
Morning: private transfer with slack for the two things that actually go wrong — traffic and the departure tax-refund queue, both budgeted into pickup time. Your guide checks you through to security.
Afternoon / evening: in the air, reachable. We stay on until you're home and the luggage is too.
Peak moment: none planned — by design. Departure day working is its own small triumph.
The same ten days with the operational reasoning exposed — ticket-release tactics, driver staging, the maths of early starts — is published separately as Classic China, worked out in full, and the planning logic generalises in our first-time China itinerary guide.
Page twelve
How this itinerary changes around you
The document above is a starting argument, not a fixed product. Three real adjustments, by way of example:
By motive
Food-first travellers get the cooking class doubled and a Chengdu extension priced in; art people swap the Muslim Quarter evening for Xi'an's contemporary galleries and Shanghai's West Bund; history people add the Shaanxi History Museum and slow Xi'an to two full days. The route bends; the daily rhythm — one thing per morning, one per afternoon — doesn't.
By pace and party
Four travellers share the car and the guide, which is why €3,300 per person at four, against €3,800 at two — and why six pays less still, on request. Knees that dislike steps turn Day 3's hike into a cable car and a shorter, flatter stretch, and Jingshan into the Beihai lakeshore. With children, dinners move earlier and Day 9 becomes the fixed point everyone plans backwards from.
Page thirteen
What's included
Included
Nine nights' boutique 4-star accommodation with breakfast · private guide matched to your language in each city · private car and driver for all transfers and touring — you never drive, that's policy, not an upsell · first-class rail and the domestic flight as described · every entrance ticket and reservation, booked real-name · luggage sent hotel-to-hotel on rail days · a working mobile payment setup and SIM/eSIM advice · daily support from our operations team, until you're home.
Not included
International flights — the price is land only, so you book the fares that suit you and we advise on timings · lunches and dinners (your guide eats with you and orders for the table; budget €50–80 per person per day for very good meals) · travel insurance, which is required · personal spending · gratuities, entirely at your discretion.
Page fourteen
The price, in writing
| Party | Per person | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| 2 travellers | €3,800 | Boutique 4-star hotels, one room, land only |
| 4 travellers | €3,300 | Boutique 4-star hotels, two rooms, land only |
| 6 travellers | on request | Rooming to suit your party, land only |
Quoted and invoiced in euros as a single land arrangement. Hotel-grade upgrades (5-star, heritage) and extensions reprice transparently — typically cost plus a 20–25% handling fee, quoted before any commitment. International flights and travel insurance sit outside the land price under our Land-Only Rule.
Questions people ask
FAQ
When should I ask for a customised itinerary?
As soon as you have rough dates and a party size. For spring and autumn departures, five to six months ahead is comfortable because the hard tickets — Forbidden City entries, first-class rail — are real-name and release-bound, and we book the moment they open. Last-minute is sometimes possible, but flexibility on the famous sites narrows quickly.
Can I change the number of days?
Yes. The ten-day shape shortens well to eight (Beijing and Shanghai, with Xi'an as the cut) and stretches naturally to twelve or fourteen by adding Chengdu, Guilin or a water-town night. The price scales roughly linearly: about €330–380 per person per day, land costs covered, on the boutique 4-star basis.
Are international flights included?
No. The price is land only: it covers everything on the ground in China from airport welcome to airport send-off, but not your flights to and from China. You book the fares that suit you; we advise on arrival and departure timing so the first and last days still work.
Can we bring children?
Yes, and the pace suits them: one thing per morning, one per afternoon, with slack built in. We adjust the day shape around naps and attention spans, size the vehicle for car seats, and swap the evening programme for earlier dinners. Tell us the ages and we will show you the family version of this document.
What languages do the guides speak?
Your guide is matched to your language — English or German as standard, French or Spanish on request and confirmed before booking. The written itinerary you receive is in your language too, including every address and train number, so the document keeps working even when you're on your own for an evening.
Is this exact document what I'll receive?
This page is the shape of the document. Yours arrives as a roughly twenty-page proposal built the same way — overview table, day-by-day sections, hotel types, price breakdown and booking terms — but rebuilt around your dates, your party and your interests, and quoted in writing before you commit to anything.
Last verified: August 2026 — prices, hotel tiers and booking mechanics checked against current proposals.
Get yours
Answer three questions, get your version.
Dates, party, and the one thing you most want from China. We reply within one working day with honest thoughts — and, when the fit is right, a document like this one, rebuilt around you and quoted in writing.