Romantic China in 10 days: Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Yangshuo
Nobody's first thought about China is romance, and that is largely because the standard itinerary is built around imperial scale and crowds. Move the trip south, drop the sight count, and the country has an entirely different register: gardens designed for two people and a moon, tea hills, a river b
- Duration
- 10 days
- Pace
- Relaxed
- Hotel changes
- 4
- Best months
- Apr, May, Sep, Oct, Nov
- From
- $3,600 per person
This route uses four bases in ten days, all of them within an hour or two of each other except the last, and it is deliberately short on scheduled mornings. Half the days here have one thing in them.
Ten days, four hotel changes, one internal flight, two rail legs of about an hour each, and five afternoons with nothing planned.
Who it suits: couples, honeymoons and anniversary trips. Anyone who would rather have three good hours a day than nine average ones.
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.
Day by day
Day 1: Arrive Shanghai. Private transfer to the former French Concession, which is where Shanghai is worth staying: plane trees, low lane houses, coffee and no tour groups. Nothing scheduled. Dinner within walking distance.
Day 2: Shanghai, at your pace. A late breakfast, then a walk through the concession lanes with a guide who works in architecture rather than in flags: the shikumen lane houses, the art deco apartment blocks, the story of what this district was.
Afternoon free. Evening on the Bund at dusk, when the light on the Pudong towers comes on across the water, and dinner at a table upstairs facing it.
Day 3: Shanghai to Suzhou. Half an hour by high-speed rail. Suzhou is a canal city of gardens, and the reason to come is that Chinese classical gardens are private landscapes designed for a small number of people, which means they only work when they are empty.
So we book you into a courtyard hotel inside the old town, and we send you into the Master of the Nets garden in the evening, after the day visitors leave, when it is lit and quiet and about twenty people are in it.
Day 4: Suzhou, gardens and silk. The Humble Administrator’s Garden at opening time with a guide, which is the largest and the one that needs explaining. Then the Suzhou Museum next door, which is the last building I. M. Pei designed and is worth an hour on its own.
Afternoon on the water: a private wooden boat on the old canals in the Pingjiang district, an hour, in the late light. Or a silk workshop, or nothing at all.
Day 5: Suzhou to Hangzhou. About an hour and a half by rail. We stay outside the city on the tea hills at Longjing or above the western shore of West Lake, rather than in the centre, because the point of Hangzhou is the quiet side.
Afternoon free. Evening walk on the lake path.
Day 6: Hangzhou, tea and water. Morning in the Longjing tea villages with a grower: the terraces, the picking, the wok-firing done by hand, and a tasting that is a lesson rather than a shop. Then lunch in the village.
Afternoon on West Lake by private boat and on foot along the Su causeway, going at the end of the day rather than the middle. Lingyin Temple if you want a temple, early.
Day 7: Hangzhou to Yangshuo. Fly to Guilin, about two and a half hours, then transfer about an hour and a quarter into the karst country. We stay in a small hotel in the fields outside the town, on the Yulong river, not on West Street.
Nothing scheduled. Dinner on a terrace with hills in front of it.
Day 8: The river, early. A private bamboo raft on the Yulong at first light, when the mist is on the water and the buffalo are in it and there is nobody else out. Ninety minutes and the reason this stop is on the itinerary.
The rest of the day is yours. Cycling the lanes through the pomelo orchards, a cooking class, or the hotel.
Day 9: Xingping and the old ferry reach. The stretch of the Li river at Xingping is the one on the back of the twenty yuan note, and a small private boat from Yangdi in the afternoon light is a different experience from the four-hour tourist cruise at midday. Three hours in total including the drive.
Evening free. If you want the Impression Liu Sanjie outdoor show on the river, this is the night, and we will tell you honestly that it is large and popular and not everyone’s evening.
Day 10: Departure. Transfer to Guilin airport, about an hour and a quarter, and on to your connection. Or a late flight and a slow morning.
What is included
Accommodation with breakfast throughout in the properties described, including a courtyard hotel in Suzhou and a river-facing room in Yangshuo, all rail legs in first class, the internal flight, private cars with English-speaking drivers on transfer and excursion days, licensed guides on four half days, the evening entry to the Master of the Nets garden, a private canal boat in Suzhou, the Longjing tea morning with a grower, a private West Lake boat, a private dawn raft on the Yulong and a private boat on the Li at Xingping, one dinner reservation we would fight for 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
- Honeymoon rather than a holiday? Add two nights and go up a tier. There are three properties in this region, one in Hangzhou and two in the Yangshuo valley, that are worth the difference, and we will show you the actual rooms.
- Want a city at the end rather than the start? Reverse it and finish in Shanghai. We prefer the current order because arriving jet-lagged into Shanghai is easier than arriving jet-lagged into a rice field.
- Travelling in summer? Jiangnan in July and August is hot and very humid, in the low nineties Fahrenheit (low thirties Celsius), and the gardens are unpleasant after ten in the morning. Yangshuo is wetter but greener. We would move your dates if we can and restructure the days if we cannot.
- Twelve days? Add Huangshan between Hangzhou and Guilin, and stay on the mountain so you are above the day visitors for sunrise.
Honest notes
Suzhou and Hangzhou are extremely popular with domestic travellers, and on a weekend in season the famous gardens and the West Lake causeways are packed. Every timing decision on this itinerary exists to work around that: evening garden entries, early mornings, midweek where your dates allow. If your dates fall on a public holiday we will tell you what it will actually be like.
Yangshuo town itself is loud, neon and full of bars. The countryside five minutes away is not. Where you sleep matters more here than anywhere else on this route, and we will not put you on West Street.
The dawn raft depends on the water level, which is managed and which changes. Some mornings the Yulong runs too low and the rafts do not go. We hold a second morning for it.
Get your payment app working before you fly. Even on a trip this comfortable, the boatman and the tea grower take a QR code and nothing else.
Built by Asaf Zamshtein, our Southeast Asia and China specialist, and checked with our partner teams in China before it goes out.
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