China Travel Playbook is a self-guided playbook for a first trip to China — Beijing mapped day by day, plus the practical guide to visas, payments, rail and translation that nobody hands you at the airport.
In short: China Travel Playbook is published by Moondog Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., a small independent publisher based in Shenzhen, China. The guide is written by people who live in China and travel it on their own money. We are a publisher, not a travel agency — we do not book flights, hotels, trains or tours, and we take no commission from anything we recommend. Reach us at hello@chinatravelplaybook.com.
China is one of the easiest countries in the world to travel once you are inside it, and one of the hardest to prepare for from outside. The reason is not the language. It is that the practical layer — how you pay, how you book, what needs a passport number, what sells out and when — runs on Chinese apps and Chinese rules, and almost none of it is documented for a visitor in English.
So people arrive having researched the sights thoroughly and the system not at all. They lose the first two days to a declined card, a ticket window that closed twelve days earlier, and a taxi they could not pay for. Then they come home and realise the trip they actually wanted was two metro stops away.
This guide is the thing we wished existed the first time we did it. It is written in the order you will need it, not the order that photographs well.
Everything in the playbook is checked against primary sources rather than other travel blogs:
Where something is a matter of judgement — which district to sleep in, which Great Wall section is worth the drive — we say so plainly and give the reasoning, so you can disagree with us on purpose instead of by accident.
We make money one way: people buy the guide. That is the whole business model, and it is deliberate.
We take no commission, no affiliate fee and no payment of any kind from hotels, restaurants, tour operators, ticket resellers or transport companies. If we recommend something, it is because we used it and it worked. If it stops working, we change the recommendation — and you get the update for free.
We are not affiliated with any government, embassy, airline, hotel or tour operator mentioned in the guide.
Travel information is a snapshot, not a promise. Visa rules, booking windows, app requirements and opening hours change — sometimes with very little notice, and sometimes in ways that make a printed page wrong. The playbook tells you where to verify each item against the official source before you rely on it, and we flag anything with a short shelf life.
You are responsible for your own travel decisions. We are responsible for giving you the most accurate, specific and honestly-reasoned starting point we can.
Questions about the guide, a correction, a billing problem, or a city you want us to build next — email us. A person reads it, and we usually reply the same day.
Beijing is the first chapter, and it is on sale now. The other cities on our roadmap are still in research — see the roadmap.