The Motherland Starter Pack

Fly into Beijing Capital (PEK) on any flight, at any hour — a guide meets you at arrivals and gets you to the hotel in central Beijing, in Chongwenmen or Xidan, within walking distance of Tiananmen. Land at Daxing (PKX) instead and you make your own way in: a taxi, or the Daxing Airport Express plus metro, about an hour.

Nothing is scheduled. Sleep off the flight, or drop your bags and go find the first bowl of zhajiangmian. Dinner tonight is on you; the first crew meal is tomorrow, after the Wall.

Mutianyu is the section you want: 5.4 km of restored Ming-dynasty wall, 23 watchtowers, and a fraction of Badaling's tour-bus crowds. The cable car — included, both ways — drops you at Tower 14. East from there is the gentler stretch; west climbs toward Towers 20–23, where the steps turn into a staircase for people who never skip leg day. Go as far as your legs and the crew vote. The toboggan you've seen online runs off the far end of the section on a different lift, and isn't part of the ticket.

Lunch near the Wall is the Huairou speciality, rainbow trout. On the way back in: a photo stop at the 2008 Olympic Park — the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube (Ice Cube since the 2022 Winter Games) — then Panjiayuan, Beijing's biggest antique and flea market: 3,000-odd stalls of jade, porcelain, calligraphy, Mao-era kitsch and ‘Ming vases’ made last Tuesday. It's fullest at weekends; on a weekday it's a calmer browse. Bargain in numbers on a phone screen — no Mandarin required.

This is the day your parents' wall calendar was made of. Tiananmen Square first — 765 by 282 metres of it — then through the Meridian Gate into the Forbidden City: 72 hectares, roughly 9,000 rooms, home to 24 Ming and Qing emperors and the setting of every palace drama you've half-watched with your mum. You walk it south to north along the centre line and come out the north gate to climb Jingshan — the 46-metre hill built from the moat's spoil — for the one view that fits the whole golden roofscape in a single frame. Since 2024 the whole line, Tiananmen to the Temple of Heaven, is UNESCO-listed in its own right as the Beijing Central Axis.

After dumplings at a hundred-year-old house, south to the Temple of Heaven, where the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests — 38 metres of blue-tiled timber, built without a single nail — sits in a park full of retirees doing tai chi, ballroom and jianzi like it's a league. The operator flags this as the fullest day of the trip; wear the shoes. The Forbidden City closes on Mondays and its real-name tickets do sell out; if that lands on your date, the day swaps in Prince Gong's Mansion, the garden estate of the Qing dynasty's most spectacularly corrupt official.

Morning at the Summer Palace, the Qing court's escape from the Forbidden City: 290 hectares, three-quarters of it Kunming Lake, with Longevity Hill and its temples stacked up the north shore. You walk the Long Corridor — 728 metres of painted beams, 14,000-odd scenes from Chinese myths, novels and landscapes — and cross the lake by boat instead of walking the long way round. Then back into the old city for Shichahai's three lakes, Yandai Xiejie's pipe-shop-turned-snack-street, and a rickshaw loop through the hutongs: grey-brick courtyard lanes, laundry, birdcages, old men mid-argument over a game of xiangqi. This is the Beijing your grandparents' stories were set in, and there's less of it every year.

Afternoon: Beijing West station and the high-speed train to Xi'an — about 1,200 km in roughly five hours, 300 km/h on the carriage display, second-class seats with more legroom than most economy cabins. There's a snack trolley, but the move is to load up before boarding. Your Xi'an guide meets you at the station, and dinner is waiting when you get in.

An hour east to Lintong for the Terracotta Army — found in 1974 by farmers digging a well, and still only partly excavated. Pit 1 is the one from the photos: the main infantry formation, rank after rank of life-size soldiers, no two faces the same. Pit 2 holds the cavalry, archers and chariots; Pit 3 is the command post; a few figures still carry traces of their original paint. All of it stands guard over a tomb mound a kilometre and a half away that nobody has opened. Lunch is biangbiang noodles — belt-wide, hand-pulled, and named with a character of nearly 60 strokes that most keyboards can't type.

Back in the city, up onto the Ming-dynasty city wall at Changle Gate: 13.7 km around, 12 metres high, wide enough to cycle, and the optional bike loop (about 90 minutes, own cost) is the best way to see it. Then the square under the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, built in 652 to hold the sutras the monk Xuanzang carried back from India, and once the lanterns come on, Datang Everbright City: two kilometres of Tang-dynasty theming, street performers, the ‘tumbler girl’, and half of young Xi'an in rented hanfu doing photoshoots. Entry is free; the hanfu rental isn't, and you'll be tempted.

Two hours east to Huashan, the western one of China's five sacred mountains and the one from the ‘most dangerous hike in the world’ videos. The West Peak cable car does the brutal part — 4.2 km of cable, twenty minutes, straight up a granite wall — and sets you down near the top of West Peak (2,082 m). From there the classic no-backtracking line runs to South Peak (2,155 m, the summit), on to East and Central, and finishes at North Peak for the cable car down: six-ish hours of stone stairs cut into the ridge, chain handrails, Golden Lock Pass strung with padlocks and red ribbons, and Blue Dragon Ridge, the knife-edge that looks worse than it is. The crew goes as far as the crew votes; the guide knows the shortcuts.

The Plank Walk in the Sky is on South Peak, optional and not on the itinerary: harness on, a cable to clip into, a queue, and about ¥30 paid on the spot. Nothing about this day is mandatory except the shoes. Water and snacks cost multiples up top, so carry your own. November and March run cold and windy on the ridges with a chance of ice — gloves and a wind layer are not optional. Back in Xi'an, dinner is a seafood buffet, and you will have earned every plate.

Check out, luggage on the coach, and into the old city. Gao's Courtyard is a Ming-and-Qing-era mansion on Beiyuanmen where Shaanxi shadow-puppet troupes still play short shows and paper-cutting artists work in the courtyards. Then the square between the Bell Tower (1384) and the Drum Tower (1380), and straight into the Muslim Quarter behind it. The Hui community has been here since Silk Road caravans ended at Chang'an, and the lanes are one long menu: roujiamo (the original Chinese burger), yangrou paomo (you crumble the bread into the lamb soup yourself), liangpi, persimmon cakes, lamb skewers and sour plum drink. Lunch is included; grazing before it is your own call.

North toward the airport, with a stop most tours skip: Han Yangling, the tomb of Emperor Jing of Han, where glass walkways carry you over the burial pits and their thousands of small terracotta figures — nude now, because the wooden arms and silk robes rotted away centuries ago. Then the evening flight to Shanghai; the service currently scheduled lands at Hongqiao, and the operator confirms the actual flight when the crew list closes. Your Shanghai guide meets you and drives you north to the hotel at Wusongkou, about an hour. Dinner is on you — the Quarter is the plan.

In from Baoshan — 45 minutes to an hour — for the Jade Buddha Temple, an active monastery in the middle of the city built around two Buddhas carved from Burmese jade that a monk shipped here in 1882. Then the sweep everyone does once and should: People's Square, East Nanjing Road's 1.2 km of neon pedestrian street, and the Bund — 1.5 km of riverfront and 52 heritage banks, hotels and trading houses from the concession era, the Customs House clock still chiming across the water. Lunch on the way.

Yuyuan next: a Ming garden finished in 1577 by an official for his ageing father — the 豫 in the name means peace and comfort for one's parents, which makes it the most filial stop of the trip — plus the Old Street bazaar and the zigzag bridge to the Huxinting teahouse. Then across the river to Lujiazui to stand under the Oriental Pearl and the 632-metre Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in the country, and walk the riverside promenade as the Bund lights up opposite. Shanghainese dinner is booked in the city; ERA, the acrobatics show, is an optional add-on after it.

Early start, long drive: Zhujiajiao is on the far south-west edge of Shanghai, an hour and a half from Baoshan, give or take. It earns it — a 1,700-year-old canal town with 36 stone bridges, the biggest of them Fangsheng Bridge, five arches raised in 1571 and named for the Buddhist practice of buying a fish and setting it free below. You walk North Street's Ming-and-Qing shopfronts (the snacks are zongzi and zharou, pork braised in bamboo leaves), tour Kezhi Garden — a merchant's private garden begun in 1912 that took fifteen years to finish — and ride a sculling boat through the canals, which is the correct way to see any water town.

Back in the city for two versions of the shikumen, the stone-gate lane house that once housed most of Shanghai. Tianzifang is the scruffy one: 1930s lanes off Taikang Road that artists colonised in the late nineties, now studios, craft shops and cafés with the laundry still overhead. Xintiandi is the polished one — the same architecture, restored in 2001 into restaurants and bars. If your family is Shanghainese, this is roughly what the lane your grandparents grew up in looked like. Last crew dinner tonight, and Xintiandi is right there for after.

Free morning — sleep in, or work the hotel breakfast one last time. Then a car to your Shanghai airport: Pudong (PVG) is 60 to 90 minutes from Wusongkou, Hongqiao (SHA) 50 to 70, and both swing with traffic, so book a flight you don't have to sprint for — not a dawn one.

Ten days, three cities, one crew. The trip ends at the terminal. The group chat doesn't have to.