Get a one way ticket

are you counting the travel days here? because four travel days on a six day trip is absolutely brutal, I’d stay longer someplace

Seems like a lot of travel time for a short trip, maybe spend more time in two places instead of trying to fit three in.

DeepL is good translation app.

WeChat pay is going to be helpful, and/or Alipay

Having a good VPN will be useful if you need to connect with people back home, although many foreign focused hotels have a VPN type connection built in to their Wifi and I think all of Guandong province has a similar thing with internet connection there.

My advice is to immediately find a giant salamander and stare at it as long as possible. I’m sure everything else is great too, but you can’t see a six foot long salamander anywhere else. Japan has some that are a little smaller.

Try to find a sichuan restaurant, its good spicy food and one of the big 8 regional cuisines

My suggestion:

• fly into Hong Kong, book a nice room at one of the Vegas style resorts in Macau and take the ferry over directly from the HK airport.
• Spend the following day checking out Macau, it’s a super weird little city, at the end of the day take the ferry back over to HK, which will drop you off in the center of the city.
• Plan for 5 days in HK, it’s an awesome city. Ofc it’s more politically liberal than mainland cities, and suffers from major wealth inequality (you’ll see on Sunday when it’s house keepers’ day off so they hang out on cardboard under these multinational bank HQs :/.
• I would day trip to Shenzhen, maybe 2 days in a row. I didn’t do this when I was there and I regret it.
• I would skip Beijing and do a dedicated Beijing/Shanghai trip another time, riding the train is great, but spending a whole day on it is a significant opportunity cost unless you have 10+ days for your trip.

North Korea needs a new Arms smuggler. Ask around and see if it can be you

My very limited experience (I have been to China a few times for work, and managed to find 3 days to visit Beijing and 1 day in Shanghai):

The PRC was founded on the 1st of October, which is yearly celebrated: the first week of October is official holiday, and during the month of October it’s not uncommon for Chinese to travel around for their holidays. The positive is that you see lots of red flags around, the negative is that touristic places will be busier than usual.

I agree with others that your plan is overly ambitious, traveling from the South to Beijing sounds too much. Guangzhou is also very beautiful to visit, and I was told also the same for Xiamen (that others mentioned).

For Beijing (in case you are still adamant about going): I spent 3 days in Beijing and I couldn’t see much first because there is much to see but also because you need to book things in advance (not sure how much in advance, but definitely more than 1 week which is what I tried to do). Everything that you visit will have long queues, and also going from A to B in Beijing takes forever because the city is giant (I had 1.5 hour metro rides). If you do want to spend two days, the Great Wall would be 1 day on its own, I think it’s 100% worth it because it is something really unique (October is a popular time to visit it also because it’s the season that maple trees turn red so it’s very beautiful). The second day would be Tienanmen square, and the forbidden city? Beijing has also many museums and very beautiful parks and palace gardens, that you can spend a whole day there if you want (and are lucky with the weather), but with two days I think it’s very hard.

For food, I second what someone said about Sichuan cuisine, it’s great (but very spicy). I would also suggest trying a hotpot dinner if you haven’t had it before.

As others said you need WeChat and AliPay (and add a payment method in advance) and Amaps. For WeChat you need someone to activate your account I think, while AliPay you can do on your own. You can pay anywhere with your phone (with WeChat and Alipay), your credit cards won’t work, and you can also pay in most places with cash (at least that’s my experience) if you can get some before you arrive. Through WeChat and AliPay you also have access to taxis (I think they call it DiDi), and public transportation (but I think the public transportation you need to activate in advance). If you want to travel with the train, I would suggest the train app (Railway12306). You need to add your passport in the app, and after that you can book train tickets, and you can enter the train with your passport.

My experience is that most people don’t understand or struggle with English even in very touristy places, so you need a translator (deepL as others said). People are still usually helpful and friendly, so you do survive in the end. You do need a VPN if you want to stay in touch with family etc. There are travel e-sim cards that have automatically a VPN (they are more expensive than chinese sim cards but I guess it’s a convenience). If you don’t go for some travel sim card, I would suggest getting a chinese sim card at the airport.

I hope some of it is helpful.

If you have only that long definitely just pick one spot.

if you live in the US, don’t book a return ticket

Hello! Depending on where your passport is from, you may not need a visa for a visit under 30 days, consult here (US and Canada are not on the list)

Apps you may need are WeChat and/or AliPay, and for a VPN to be able to onto the liberal website “Hexbear” I use Mullvad.

Early October isn’t exactly the best time to visit if you’re going during the start, as it’s 八一 which means there will be a lot of domestic tourists. A lot of locations/trains will be absolutely flooded or booked out. In later October, the South will still be t-shirt and short weather while the north will be colder, meaning you should pack some jackets (I’d recommend layers to easily put on take off as needed)

The blue share bicycles are available for tourists (as they are AliPay) whereas the yellow Meituan ones are rented through WeChat and require a Chinese phone number (which requires a Visa/身份证 to obtain)

You’ll also notice food portions get larger as you travel north. Always reminds me of my Tianjin grandfather saying something about southerners being stingy and/or greedy. If you ever hit the north east (东北）you might actually encounter all you can eat buffets for like $3 USD. Bear this in mind when you’re ordering food, to avoid ordering too much once you get to the north.

you have to get a visa and it takes several months unless you pay for it to be expedited, which is very expensive. Start looking into applying now.

Everyone has already mentioned to leave BJ off for another trip. The train ride would be your whole day (I’ve done BJ to HK amd it’s rough) I’d suggest a day trip to Guangzhou instead, or if you want to visit another province then consider Xiamen (in Fujian). Three hours by high-speed rail

Download gaode ditu (Amap) or Baidu maps for navigation. On WeChat download the mini program 乘车码 or 城市通 which will let you scan a QR code for public transport. I think it should be enabled for most mainland capital cities. The former (chengche ma) is in English and the latter in Chinese, but all mini programs within WeChat can be translated with the on-screen translator you can find per the image below

Thanks everyone! Wow, I didn’t know about the Visa stuff. I guess that means I’ll have to delay it quite a bit. I appreciate all the advice!