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China Travel Checklist

Free 30-second pre-departure planner for foreign visitors to mainland China.

⚠️ Disclaimer: Visa & connectivity info is illustrative and changes frequently. Always verify with official sources (Chinese embassy / NIA) before booking — see the transit visa guide for where to check. This site may contain affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

1 Tell us your trip

Passport country / region

Planned stay in mainland China (days)

Are you entering China as a transit / layover?

Optional — 2 more questions to fine-tune your checklist

Everything below still works with the defaults. These two only adjust one or two items each, so skip them if you'd rather move on.

Are you arriving with a SIM that already works in China?

Can you read & speak everyday Chinese?

2 Your entry summary

3 Your personalized checklist

4 eSIM & connectivity (compare before you buy)

International travel eSIMs work via Data Roaming: your traffic is routed through the carrier's home network (e.g. Hong Kong / Singapore), so global apps like Google, WhatsApp and Instagram run normally while you're in mainland China. Pick a plan that explicitly supports mainland China routing.

↔ Scroll the table sideways to see pricing, routing and the buy link.

Provider	Plan style	Indicative price	China routing	Notes	Get it

Affiliate disclosure: We may earn a commission when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you. We only list partners whose sales we can actually track, and we rank them on routing, price and plan fit — but that means we cannot list every provider: some good options (e.g. Holafly) are not affiliates of ours, so they do not appear above. Treat this table as a starting point, not a complete market survey.

* Partner links & promo codes live in config.json → affiliate.links / affiliate.promo. Empty entries produce plain (non-tracked) links, so the page is always deployable.

6 Book trains & tickets

Foreigners' easiest way to book China high-speed rail & attractions:

🚄 Trip.com — China trains & hotels 🎟️ Klook — rail tickets, tours & attractions

Booking rail yourself? Bring the same passport you used to book — it's your ticket at the gate.

Affiliate disclosure: We participate in the Trip.com and Klook affiliate programs and may earn a commission on qualified bookings, at no extra cost to you.

Found an outdated visa, price or eSIM policy? Help keep this free tool accurate — send me a correction on Reddit.

What this China travel checklist actually does

Tell it three things: the passport you will travel on, how long you are staying, and whether you are entering as a transit passenger. It returns a personalised pre-departure list, worked out from those answers rather than from a generic template. A passport that can enter visa-free for a fortnight produces a different list from a ten-day layover on the 240-hour transit exemption.

What it checks

Entry rules — whether your passport is likely to qualify for visa-free entry or the transit exemption, based on country and trip length. Read the transit visa guide.
Payments — binding a foreign Visa or Mastercard to Alipay and WeChat Pay, which is how most everyday spending in mainland China works. Read the payments guide.
Connectivity — why an ordinary roaming plan or hotel wifi behaves differently from a travel eSIM routed outside the mainland, and what to check before buying one. Read the eSIM guide.
Getting around — ride-hailing, metro tickets and booking high-speed rail as a foreigner, with the passport points that trip people up.
The small things — translation apps that work offline, how much cash to carry, and what to sort out before you lose signal.

How to use it

Answer the questions and generate your list.
Export it as a PDF or a PNG, so you can open it at the airport with no signal.
Work through it before you fly — most of it is much harder to fix once you land.

Who is behind it

This is an independent, free tool rather than a booking site. There are no accounts and no advertising, and the site sets no cookies — see privacy and cookies. Where the checklist links to a booking partner, that is disclosed on the page. The policy details change often, so every page carries a "last verified" date and an address for corrections.