Things to Know Before Visiting China: A First-Timer Pre-Trip Checklist

What you will find when you search this question, and why it is not enough

Results for this query are overwhelmingly lists. Ten things, twenty five things, twenty three unwritten rules, a forum thread where people argue about which of the twenty five matter. They are pleasant to read and almost all of them are true. The problem is structural rather than factual: a list has no dependencies, so it cannot tell you what to do first, and a list has no failure states, so it cannot tell you what happens when you skip an item.

That gap is where first trips actually go wrong. A reader who has absorbed forty tips still does not know that setting up a payment app is worthless until the phone has a working data plan, or that a VPN installed after landing may not install at all. So this page is organised as a sequence with consequences attached, and each section ends with what breaks if you leave it until you are standing in the terminal.

The order matters more than the list

Six jobs, and they run in a chain. Decide how you will get data. Install and test the apps that need data. Bind a payment method to those apps. Fix your maps and your address book. Sort out money that is not in an app. Then handle documents, health and etiquette, which are independent and can be done any time before you fly.

The rule behind the chain is simple: anything that requires a working internet connection to a service that is blocked in China has to be finished before you board. Everything else can be done in any order, and most of it can be done badly without wrecking the trip.

Connectivity: the Great Firewall is the first domino

Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and X are blocked on Chinese networks. This is not a filter you stumble around; it is the default state of the internet you will be using. If your trip planning lives in Gmail and your navigation lives in Google Maps, you are arriving with both of your main tools unplugged.

There are two honest routes. The first is a travel eSIM or a roaming plan issued outside China, which routes your traffic through the issuing network and leaves most blocked services reachable without extra software. The second is a local SIM or hotel wifi plus a VPN that you have installed, paid for and tested before departure.

The failure mode to understand is that these are not interchangeable. A travel eSIM gives you data that behaves like home. A local SIM gives you a Chinese number, local pricing and a network that enforces the block, which is useful for deliveries and useless for Gmail. Tourists regularly buy the cheap local option and then discover that the apps they need to configure the rest of their trip will not load.

Practical sequence: install the VPN client and any eSIM profile at home, over your own wifi, while the download pages are reachable. Then, on arrival, test one blocked service before you leave the airport. If it fails, you still have airport wifi and a terminal full of people who can help. Discovering it three hours later in a hotel room at midnight is the expensive version.

Two smaller habits pay for themselves. Download an offline map area for each city on your route, and download any shows, tickets or boarding passes you will want on the flight. Neither needs a VPN and both work when nothing else does.

Payments: go mobile-first, but not mobile-only

Alipay and WeChat Pay are the default at shops, metros, chain restaurants and street stalls. Cash is legal and accepted, but many small vendors have no change and some have quietly stopped keeping any. A foreign visitor can normally link an international card inside one of these apps, and the linking step is the part that fails.

Do the linking at home, days before you fly, and treat it as a test rather than a formality. Card issuers sometimes decline the first small verification charge, and some require a call to confirm the transaction is really you. That conversation is easy from your living room and close to impossible from a noodle shop with one bar of signal.

Then keep a fallback layer. Carry a few hundred yuan in cash, broken into small notes, because the taxi that takes cards is not the taxi you will find at midnight. Tell your bank you are travelling so the card is not frozen on day two. Keep a second card in a different bag from the first, and keep both away from the phone you are paying with: if the phone is lost or the battery dies, you want the physical backup to be somewhere else.

One detail that catches people: a card that works perfectly in a hotel terminal may still fail inside an app, because the app is doing a different kind of authorisation. Testing both, once, before departure, removes the surprise.

Getting around: the map problem is the real one

Google Maps is unreliable in China, both for routing and for the existence of places. Use Amap or Baidu Maps for directions, and expect them to be in Chinese. When a local app has an English interface it is often thinner than the Chinese one, so the useful move is not to hunt for an English map but to learn three things: how to paste a Chinese address, how to read the distance and direction of the next turn, and how to recognise the walking mode icon.

Ride hailing runs through Didi, which has an English mode and lets you type a destination instead of explaining it. That typed destination is the whole point. Save your hotel address in Chinese characters, plus a screenshot of the building front, because most drivers will not read an English hotel name and many will not call a foreign number to ask.

High-speed rail is the other workhorse. Booking opens online in advance through the official rail channel, and booking a seat rather than queueing at the station is the difference between a calm morning and a sprint. Your passport is your ticket, so the name on the booking has to match it exactly. Arrive with time to clear security into the station, which is a separate step from the platform and is not fast at major hubs.

For city transport, the metro is usually the most predictable option and takes the same payment apps as shops. Signage in the big cities includes English, and platform screens show the next station in both scripts, which makes the metro the one transport mode where not reading Chinese costs you almost nothing.

Etiquette and customs: fewer rules than you expect

Tipping is not expected in restaurants, taxis or hotels. Leaving change is not rude, it is just confusing, and in some places staff will chase you to return it. The exception is high-end service where a service charge is already on the bill; pay that and stop.

Haggling is normal in markets and souvenir streets, and abnormal in shops with fixed prices. A relaxed counter-offer is part of the transaction, not a confrontation, and walking away is a legitimate move rather than an insult. In a market, the opening price is not a real price, so treating it as one produces either a bad deal or an offended seller.

Photography etiquette is stricter than visitors assume. Ask before photographing people, and expect refusals in temples, in rural areas and anywhere involving children. Some religious sites forbid photography of the interiors outright, and the sign is usually at the door rather than in English.

If you are invited to someone's home, bring something small: fruit, tea, a sweet from your own country. Elaborate formality is less welcome than something that travels well and can be shared at the table. Shoes come off at the door in most homes, and the host will usually tell you where to put them.

Two habits smooth everything else. Hand a card, a receipt or a gift with both hands, and receive the same way. And when someone offers help, accept it; refusing three times out of politeness reads as a genuine refusal and ends the exchange.

Health, safety and documents

Tap water is not for drinking. Hotels provide kettles and bottled water, and boiling tap water is normal and fine. For everything else, bottled water is cheap and everywhere, and the ice in a proper restaurant is not the risk it is often made out to be.

Check your visa or visa-free eligibility before you book anything non-refundable, and check it again closer to departure. Entry rules changed repeatedly between 2024 and 2026, including transit and short-stay arrangements that vary by nationality and by which city you enter through. The rule you read in a forum last year is not evidence about this year.

Travel insurance that covers medical evacuation is worth more here than in most destinations, simply because a serious problem in a remote area involves a long transfer. Save the policy number and the emergency line offline, in a screenshot, not in an email you cannot open.

Emergency numbers are short and worth memorising: 110 for police, 120 for ambulance, 119 for fire. Save your embassy or consulate contact in the same place. Pharmacies are common and staff are used to pointing at boxes, so a photo of your medication packaging is more useful than a translated brand name.

The failures that only appear after you land

Four of them, in rough order of how often they happen. First, the payment app will not complete a link, usually because the card issuer wants a verification step on a phone number that no longer receives texts abroad. Second, the VPN installs but will not connect, because the version you downloaded is stale or the protocol is blocked. Third, the address you saved is the hotel's English trading name rather than the Chinese street address, so no driver can act on it. Fourth, the eSIM activates but does not give data because a roaming setting is off in a menu you have never opened.

All four are testable at home and none of them are testable in the taxi queue. That is the entire argument for doing this list early: not because the items are difficult, but because their failure modes appear at the one moment when you cannot troubleshoot.

What not to over-prepare

You do not need to learn Mandarin to have a good trip. You need about ten phrases, a translation app with the offline Chinese pack installed, and the habit of showing a screen instead of saying a sentence. Camera translation on a printed menu or a station sign is the single highest-value feature on your phone in China, and it works offline.

You do not need to plan every meal. Food is the one part of a China trip where improvisation reliably works, because quality is high and price is low almost everywhere, and the failure mode is mild.

You do not need to carry a large first aid kit. You do need your own prescription medication in original packaging, with a copy of the prescription, because the same drug may be sold under a different name and dosage.

Spend your preparation on the four items at the top of this page and let the rest be approximate. A trip where the phone, the wallet, the map and the address all work is a trip that can absorb every other mistake.