Information to help you prepare for your holiday or vacation to China courtesy of Rough Guide.
With a wealth of practical and background information, this travel guide is the essential companion for your holiday. Reading up on the places you visit will help you get a little more out of vacations and help you understand local sensitivities better.
China is not so much another travel destination as another world. Cut off from the rest of Eurasia by the Himalayas to the south and the Siberian steppe to the north, it has grown up alone and aloof. The only foreigners it saw were visiting merchants from far-flung shores or uncivilized nomads from the wild steppe: peripheral, unimportant and unreal. Apart from a few ruling elites of Mongol and Manchu origin, who quickly became assimilated, China did not experience a significant influx of foreigners until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, something which still colours the experience of today's visitors to China.
While empires, languages, nations and entire peoples in the rest of the world have risen and blossomed - then disappeared without trace - China has spent the past two millennia largely recycling itself. The ferocious dragons and lions of Chinese statuary have been produced by Chinese craftsmen, with the same essentially Chinese characteristics, for 25 centuries or more, and the script still used today reached perfection at the time of the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago.
To say that the Chinese are presently enjoying better government than at any time in their recent history may not be saying much, but it is surely true. There is little sign of the Communist Party relinquishing power, or its control over the media. However, the negative stories surrounding today's China, the oppression of dissidents, the harsh treatment of criminal suspects and the imperialist behaviour towards Tibet and other minority regions, are only one part of the picture. Away from politics, the country is undergoing a huge commercial and creative upheaval. A country the size of ten Japans has entered the world market: Hong Kong-style skylines are being constructed in cities all across China.
The sheer pace of change is visible in every part of Chinese life, from the economy to the still-young independent travel industry. Travellers who visited China as little as ten years ago are amazed to hear how much the place has opened up and how many more liberal trends have emerged in the wake of the late Deng Xiaoping's free market economics. For whatever reasons you are attracted to China - its history, art, culture, politics or simply its inaccessibility - the speed at which things are changing will ensure that your holiday or vacation is a unique one.
The first thing that draws travellers on holiday to China is the extraordinary density of population: central and eastern China do not have landscapes so much as peoplescapes. In the fertile plains, villages seem to merge into one another, while the big cities are endlessly sprawling affairs with the majority of their inhabitants living in cramped shacks or in depressingly uniform dormitory buildings. This doesn't mean that China is the same everywhere - there are many regional variations in people and language; indeed, some whole areas of the People's Republic are not populated by the "Chinese", but by so-called minority peoples, of whom there are more than two hundred distinct groups, ranging from the hill tribes of the south to the Muslims of the northwest. Nevertheless, the most enduring images of China are intrinsically Chinese ones: chopsticks, tea, slippers, massed bicycles, shadow-boxing, exotic pop music, karaoke, teeming crowds, Dickensian train stations, smoky temples, red flags and the smells of soot and frying tofu - as well as the industrial vistas you would expect from one of the world's largest economies.
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