18-Day Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Zhangjiajie, Guilin & Shanghai Tour

Start your day at the Temple of Heaven. The main hall is round, the base is square – representing an old Chinese belief about heaven above and earth below.

Visit Tiananmen Square before continuing to the nearby Forbidden City, where you will enter through the imposing Meridian Gate into a complex with over 900 buildings vast open plazas.

Take a morning rickshaw ride through the hutongs – Beijing’s traditional narrow alleyways lined with courtyard homes.

Drive to Mutianyu Great Wall. This section is less crowded than Badaling Great Wall and has watchtowers every few hundred meters. You will take a cable car up and walk east or west along the wall.

Take the high-speed train to Xi’an where your tour guide will meet you at the station.

Drive to the Terracotta Army. Stand eye-to-eye with rows of life-sized soldiers, archers and officers in formation. Each is masterfully crafted and no two faces are alike. The excavation is ongoing; you’ll see archaeologists at work in a glass-walled workshop.

Stroll around the little park surrounding the Giant Wild Goose Pagodas, a Tang structure built to store Buddhist scriptures brought from India.

Then come to the Muslim Quarter and explore the bustling narrow lanes packed with food stalls selling cumin lamb, persimmon pancakes, and pomegranate juice. Your tour guide can recommend you the best ones. In the afternoon, visit the Eight Immortals Temple – a quiet Taoist temple where locals come to burn incense and have their fortunes told.

Take the high-speed train to Chengdu and visit the Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Here, you can walk through bamboo groves and stop at different well laid-out enclosures where pandas eat, sleep and climb. The base imitates the wild environment of the panda through landscaping. The panda birthing room, several luxurious “panda villas”, a panda breeding area, research center, and panda hospital are scattered throughout the base and open to visitors.

Visit Sanxingdui Museum. Here, you can witness artifacts from a fascinating bronze age civilization that left no written records. You can marvel at artifacts that are unique and unlike any other historical civilization in China: bronze masks with protruding eyes, a giant gold scepter, and a 4‑meter bronze tree with birds perched on branches.

Continue to Baoguang Temple, a working Buddhist temple with a 13‑story pagoda, where you hear monks chanting in the main hall. Few tourists come here. Explore Wide and Narrow Alley in the afternoon, where locals sit on bamboo stools, playing cards and sipping jasmine tea.

Take the high-speed train to Jiuzhaigou National Park, leaving the flat Sichuan basin for mountainous scenery. You see the landscape change; wheat fields giving way to forested slopes. A local driver will meet you and take you to Muni Valley. This is a less-known area compared to Jiuzhaigou but with similar magnificent views; green‑blue pools stacked like rice terraces, a wide waterfall cascading over limestone rocks. Finally, check in at your local hotel and have a good rest.

After breakfast, a shuttle bus takes you to the top of Jiuzhaigou National Park, at 3,100 meters altitude. From here, you can walk down following a series of lakes, of which Five Flower Lake is the most famous one. The water is incredibly clear, allowing you to see submerged tree trunks all the way at the bottom of the lake. Colors shift from turquoise to emerald to deep blue, depending on light and mineral content. The Pearl Shoal Waterfall flows over a wide limestone shelf like a white sheet, then drops 20 meters into a pool. Another gorgeous sight is the deep blue Long Lake, surrounded by forested mountains. Around 15:00 the light changes, turning the lake from bright blue to deep green.

The morning is spent in Golden Monkey Valley, a quiet part of the reserve with small lakes and a few boardwalks. Few tourists come this far, and you may hear birds before you see them as you follow a stream through the forest. Take the high-speed train back to Chengdu and have a good rest.

Take the high-speed train to Zhangjiajie where your guide will meet you at the station and drive you to your hotel for check-in.

You will be picked up from your hotel and driven to Shanghai airport. This is the end of your China Tour. We hope you had a great time with us, and we hope to welcome you again!