Boutique China in 12 days: courtyards, a bamboo forest and a karst valley

What China has instead, and what has appeared quietly over the last fifteen years, is a small group of properties that are actually about where they are: a Qing courtyard house in a Beijing hutong, a lane house in the Shanghai concession, a run of converted farmhouses in the bamboo above Moganshan, and half a dozen small hotels in the fields outside Yangshuo where the karst towers start in the garden.

This route uses four of them, with three nights in each, and it is built for people who would rather stay somewhere for three days than pass through six places.

Twelve days, four hotel changes, one internal flight, two rail legs and six days with a single thing scheduled.

Who it suits: travellers who care where they sleep, couples, and anyone returning to China who has already done the imperial checklist.

Your specialist: Asaf Zamshtein, our Southeast Asia and China specialist, with Mai Est, our Head of Consulting.

A note on who is on the ground. Our own offices are in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines. China is not one of them. We run this route through Chinese partner teams we have worked with for years, and the hotels on it are places our consultants have stayed in.

Day by day

Day 1: Arrive Beijing. Private transfer to a courtyard hotel in the hutongs north of the Forbidden City. These properties hold between six and twenty rooms, sit around one or two open courtyards, and have a grey brick lane outside the door with people playing cards in it. Nothing scheduled.

Day 2: Beijing, the imperial city, early. The Forbidden City at opening with a guide, two and a half hours, out before the tour groups reach the inner courts. Afternoon free, or the Temple of Heaven late in the day.

Evening at a Peking duck house our team books.

Day 3: The Great Wall, and lunch above it. Jinshanling with a car and a guide: an unrestored ridge section, two to three hours of walking on original wall with watchtowers every few hundred yards and almost nobody on it. Lunch in a village below.

The alternative is Mutianyu with a cable car and a shorter walk, and there is a small hotel in a village near the wall we can put you in for the night if you would rather not drive back. We will suggest it.

Day 4: Beijing, art and the lanes. Morning at the 798 art district, or the Poly Art Museum for the bronzes, which is small, quiet and superb. Afternoon in the hutongs on foot: the Drum Tower, a courtyard we can get you into, and the shops on Wudaoying and Fangjia.

Day 5: Beijing to Shanghai. 819 miles (1,318 km) in about four and a half hours by rail, business class if you want it, which on this route is one of the few times it is worth the difference.

Afternoon and evening in the former French Concession, where you are staying in a converted lane house with plane trees outside it.

Day 6: Shanghai, architecture and art. A morning walk on the concession architecture with a specialist guide: shikumen lanes, art deco, the story of the 1920s and 1930s city. Afternoon at the West Bund galleries or the Power Station of Art, both of which are among the better contemporary art institutions in Asia.

Evening on the Bund.

Day 7: Shanghai, free. Nothing scheduled. Tailoring, coffee, the Yu Garden early, the antiques at Dongtai, or the hotel. We put a table aside for dinner and otherwise leave you alone.

Day 8: Shanghai to Moganshan. Two and a half hours by road into the bamboo hills of northern Zhejiang, where Shanghai went to escape the summer a century ago and where a run of stone villas and farmhouses has been converted into small hotels. Around 2,300 feet (700 m), cooler, and green in every direction.

Afternoon free. The best thing here is a chair and a view.

Day 9: Moganshan, on foot and in the tea. A morning walk on the ridge paths through the bamboo, three to four hours if you want them, past the old villas and the reservoir. Afternoon in the tea terraces, or the pool, or nothing.

Day 10: Moganshan to Yangshuo. Transfer to Hangzhou and fly to Guilin, about two and a half hours total in the air and on the ground either side, then an hour and a quarter to the Yulong valley. We use a hotel in the fields outside Yangshuo town with the river in front of it.

Day 11: The river, early, and the lanes. A private bamboo raft on the Yulong at first light, before the mist lifts. Then the day is yours: cycling the flat lanes between the karst towers, a cooking class, the Xingping reach of the Li river in the afternoon light by private boat.

Day 12: Departure. Transfer to Guilin airport, about an hour and a quarter, and on to your connection.

What is included

Accommodation with breakfast throughout in the four properties described, all rail legs in first or business class, the internal flight, private cars with English-speaking drivers on all transfer and excursion days, licensed specialist guides on five half days including an architecture guide in Shanghai, Great Wall entry and the Jinshanling walk with a village lunch, the Forbidden City with a first-entry slot, a private dawn raft on the Yulong, a private Li river boat at Xingping, dinner reservations we would defend in each city, a VPN and payment apps set up and tested before departure, and a WhatsApp group with your consultant and our partner teams throughout, with WeChat alongside it as a local fallback.

What we would change, and when

• Want the fifth property? There are two courtyard hotels in Pingyao and one converted merchant house in Suzhou that would each justify two nights. Suzhou fits neatly between Beijing and Shanghai. Pingyao adds a day and a slower train.
• Prefer city hotels? Then this is not the right route and we would build you the Peninsula, Aman and Bulgari version, which is a genuinely excellent trip and a different one. Say so and we will price both.
• Travelling in summer? Moganshan is the reason this route survives July and August: it is several degrees cooler than Shanghai, which sits in the low nineties Fahrenheit (low thirties Celsius) with heavy humidity. We would extend Moganshan and shorten Shanghai.
• Winter dates? Beijing air quality between November and March is the variable. The courtyard hotels are at their best under snow and we build indoor alternatives for the days that need them. Moganshan is cold and mostly closed, and we would swap it for Suzhou.

Honest notes

Courtyard hotels in Beijing are beautiful and they are old buildings in a conservation district. That means small rooms, occasional plumbing noise, no lift, and a lane you walk the last hundred yards down with your case. Everyone who stays in one prefers it to the tower. We would rather you knew the trade.

Moganshan is a weekend destination for Shanghai and Hangzhou, which means Friday and Saturday nights are busy and expensive and Monday to Thursday is nearly empty. We schedule midweek where your dates allow.

The good properties in the Yangshuo valley have between eight and thirty rooms and they fill four to six months ahead for April, May, October and November. This is the booking constraint on the whole itinerary, not the flights.

Get your payment app working before you fly. Even at this level, the raft, the taxi and the village lunch are QR code transactions.

Built by Asaf Zamshtein, our Southeast Asia and China specialist, and checked with our partner teams in China before it goes out.

Related

• China: the complete guide
• Romantic China in 10 days
• Classic China in 12 days