China recorded 154.5 million inbound visits in 2025, a 17% increase on the previous year, with 30 million of those arriving under visa-free arrangements that have expanded to cover the UK, Canada, and most of Western Europe (Reuters, March 2026). The growth is not accidental. China's infrastructure for foreign visitors: payment apps, bilingual transport, international clinics. It has caught up with the scale of the ambition.
The problem is that most Western travel guides haven't caught up with China. They describe a country defined by ancient monuments and street food, which is true but incomplete. What they miss is the version of China that exists right now: a network of 350km/h trains connecting cities you haven't heard of yet, night markets that operate as public dining rooms until 2am, and, on the same trip, a comprehensive health check at a fraction of what you'd pay at home.
My first time in China, I flew into Shenzhen for a tech industry conference and stayed four days. I went back the following year for longer, then again the year after that. Each trip recalibrated something. The trains were the first surprise. Not that I hadn't read about them; nothing quite prepares you for boarding a 350km/h service as a routine Tuesday commute. The health screening came later, on my fourth trip, after a colleague mentioned what she'd had done in Shanghai for roughly what I'd normally spend on a long weekend at home. I thought she was exaggerating. She wasn't. These are the experiences that made China worth going back to, and the ones I'd tell anyone planning a first trip they shouldn't skip.
These are seven experiences worth planning your trip around.
Key takeaways
- China had 154.5 million inbound visits in 2025, up 17% year-on-year, with UK and Canadian citizens now entering visa-free for 30 days (Reuters, 2026)
- Seven experiences here cannot be replicated at home at the same price point or scale; the health screening entry saves most Western visitors $2,500–7,500 versus the home-market equivalent
- A coordination service turns health screening in China from a logistics challenge into a straightforward half-day appointment with results in 48 hours
1. Ride the world's largest high-speed rail network
China operates 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail, more than the rest of the world combined (National Railway Administration of China, 2025; corroborated by Financial Times, 2025). A ticket from Shenzhen to Shanghai covers 2,300 kilometres in eight hours and costs approximately CNY 553 ($77) in second class. The same door-to-door journey by air, including airport transit time, is broadly comparable, but the train arrives in the city centre.
What no travel guide quite prepares you for is the normality of it. The trains run on the scheduled minute. The carriages are clean and quiet. At speed, the landscape between Wuhan and Chengdu shifts through mountain tunnels and river valleys at a pace that makes you recalculate your understanding of the country's scale. The bullet train is not a tourist attraction. It's what residents use to visit family, and the experience of being treated as an ordinary passenger on an extraordinary piece of infrastructure is part of what makes it worth doing.
Tickets for foreigners are now straightforward to buy via Trip.com or 12306.cn using an international passport. The network connects every city Goji Health Care serves (Shenzhen, Wuhan, Chengdu, Shanghai, and Chongqing), which makes combining a health screening with a city-to-city journey a practical option rather than a detour.
2. Eat through a night market
Night markets in China are not tourist infrastructure. They're where residents eat dinner, and that distinction matters. The food is priced accordingly: a full meal of three dishes and a drink costs CNY 30–80 ($4–11), and the dishes are regional and specific in a way that makes them largely unavailable outside the city where they're made. The Guardian and BBC Travel have both covered China's street food culture extensively, though neither fully captures what it's like to eat at a Wuhan noodle cart at 10pm on a weekday when you're the only foreigner in the queue.
The ones worth knowing: Wuhan's night market near Jianghan Road runs long and serves re gan mian (hot dry noodles) from street carts that have been doing it for decades. Xi'an's Muslim Quarter is the canonical introduction: lamb skewers, cumin flatbreads, pomegranate juice. It's crowded enough at 9pm on a Tuesday to require patience. Chengdu's Jinli Street food corridor is more tourist-oriented but still serves genuinely good cold noodles and skewered rabbit heads, which are as good as they sound once you've committed. Shenzhen's Shekou area has a cluster of night-market lanes that operate for the city's large resident population rather than for visitors, which makes the pricing and atmosphere noticeably different.
The practical note for non-Mandarin speakers: ordering works by pointing. The stalls are open displays. Nobody expects you to read anything.
3. Stand in front of something genuinely ancient
The Terracotta Army in Xi'an (8,000 life-size soldiers buried in 210 BC) was discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well. Most of it remains unexcavated. The Great Wall stretches 21,196 kilometres across multiple dynasties, according to a 2012 survey by China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the most comprehensive measurement ever conducted. The Forbidden City in Beijing was completed in 1420 and governed the country for five centuries. None of these facts get less interesting the closer you stand to them.
The honest advice on each: the Terracotta Army requires a full morning, not a rushed afternoon. The Great Wall is worth visiting at Mutianyu (less crowded than Badaling, better preserved than Jinshanling, accessible by cable car). The Forbidden City is large enough that most people see a third of it; the northern pavilions and garden sections past the main axis are less busy and more interesting than the ceremonial halls at the front.
4. Visit the giant pandas in Chengdu
The global giant panda population is approximately 1,864, with around 80% living in Sichuan province (IUCN Red List, 2022). The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding houses over 200 of them in a semi-wild setting across 113 hectares. Entry is CNY 55 ($8). It is the only place in the world where a foreign visitor can reliably observe giant pandas in a habitat designed around their natural behaviour rather than visitor convenience, and the distinction is visible.
The pandas are most active in the morning, before 10am, when they're fed and move around the enclosures. After 11am, in warm weather, they sleep, which is still worth seeing but requires less time. The cub nursery is seasonal (cubs are born between July and September, visible in the nursery from roughly October onwards). The base runs an active conservation research programme; what you're walking through is a working facility, not a theme park version of one.
Chengdu itself is worth two days. The city's food reputation is accurate, the Leshan Giant Buddha is a 90-minute drive, and Chengdu is also one of the five cities where Goji Health Care coordinates health screenings, making it a practical stop if you're planning a health checkup on the same trip.
5. Try a Traditional Chinese Medicine consultation
China has approximately 60,000 licensed Traditional Chinese Medicine institutions (National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 2024). TCM has been practised continuously for over 2,500 years and remains formally integrated into China's mainstream healthcare system alongside Western medicine. A consultation at a licensed clinic (pulse diagnosis, tongue examination, discussion of symptoms) costs CNY 200–500 ($28–70) and includes a treatment plan that might involve acupuncture, an herbal prescription, or both.
The honest framing is that a TCM consultation and a comprehensive Western diagnostic screening serve different purposes. TCM works from a different diagnostic model, one concerned with pattern and balance rather than specific pathology markers. Neither replaces the other. Visiting both on the same trip gives you a picture of your health from two distinct perspectives, which is more interesting than either alone. For visitors who want to understand Chinese healthcare rather than just use it, the TCM consultation is the more culturally specific of the two.
A few practical points: ask specifically for a licensed TCM physician rather than a general consultation at a wellness spa (the quality differs considerably). In major cities, several teaching hospitals affiliated with TCM universities offer consultations that are both high-quality and less expensive than private TCM clinics in tourist areas. Bring a translator app; most TCM physicians do not consult in English, and the diagnostic conversation is where the session's value lies.
6. Book a comprehensive health screening
A comprehensive health screening in China (full blood panel, abdominal ultrasound, ECG, chest X-ray, and a physician consultation) costs CNY 800–3,000 ($110–420) at international-grade facilities (Beijing United Family Hospital, 2025). The US out-of-pocket equivalent for a comparable executive physical is $3,000–8,000 (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2026). The examination takes three to five hours and is complete in a single morning.
For a Western visitor, the barrier isn't the cost or the clinical quality. China's top-tier facilities are accredited under the National Health Commission's Grade 3A standard, and a growing number hold ISQua-certified international accreditation. The barrier is legibility: the appointment process runs in Mandarin, the queuing logic is different from what a Western visitor recognises, and the report arrives in Chinese without context.
That's the problem Goji Health Care exists to solve. Goji Health Care coordinates health screenings for foreign visitors across Shenzhen, Wuhan, Chengdu, Shanghai, and Chongqing. The service handles the full process: a pre-confirmed appointment at a vetted partner facility, an English-speaking coordinator who manages all communication with the facility in Chinese on your behalf, and a bilingual digital report delivered within two to three business days, including a plain-English summary. Payment is by international card at booking. No Chinese bank account required.
The people I've spoken to who've done this tend to fit one of three profiles. There's the North American with a high-deductible plan who's been putting off a proper checkup because the out-of-pocket cost at home is simply too high to justify. There's the UK or EU visitor who wants tests (Vitamin D, thyroid panel, cardiovascular imaging) that the NHS won't cover preventively and Bupa charges considerably for. And there's the person in their 40s with a specific concern they want properly investigated, faster and more thoroughly than their home system currently allows. In all three cases, the China trip was already happening. The health check fitted into a morning they'd otherwise have spent in a hotel.
View Goji's Essential, Targeted, and Premium Retreat packages or speak to a coordinator on WhatsApp before you travel.
7. Navigate a cashless megacity
China processed over 1 quadrillion CNY ($140 trillion) in mobile payments in 2024, making it the world's largest mobile payment market by volume (People's Bank of China, 2025; reported by Bloomberg, 2025). In practical terms, this means China's major cities run almost entirely on WeChat Pay and Alipay. Subway gates, street food stalls, taxis, hospitals, and convenience stores all accept mobile payment, and many no longer accept cash at all.
As of 2025, both Alipay and WeChat Pay accept international Visa and Mastercard without requiring a Chinese bank account. The setup takes around ten minutes before you depart. Without it, you'll spend an increasing amount of time in China explaining to vendors why you're handing them cash.
What makes this worth listing as an experience rather than a practical note is the texture of it. A city where every transaction runs through a phone, where you can split a restaurant bill, unlock a shared bicycle, and book a doctor's appointment from the same app, operates at a different pace than anything available in Western markets. It's not better or worse; it's a genuinely different model of urban infrastructure, worth spending time in if you've never seen it.
The parallel for Goji visitors: Goji's booking and payment process mirrors this orientation without requiring Chinese payment infrastructure. International card at checkout, WhatsApp for coordination, bilingual PDF on your phone within 48 hours. The experience is designed to feel like booking something at home.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a visa to visit China in 2026?
China extended visa-free access to UK and Canadian passport holders from February 2026, allowing 30-day stays for tourism or business (BBC, 2026). US passport holders qualify for 10-day visa-free transit under the 240-hour policy. For longer stays, a standard visa application through your country's Chinese Embassy applies; processing typically takes five to seven business days.
Can foreigners book a health screening in China without speaking Mandarin?
Direct booking at a public hospital without Mandarin is difficult. Signage, queuing systems, and clinical staff are largely Chinese-only at most facilities. International clinics in major cities have more English support but charge more. A coordination service like Goji Health Care handles all facility communication in Chinese on your behalf. You arrive with everything confirmed and a coordinator available throughout.
How long should I spend in China to do these experiences?
Ten days covers Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, and Shanghai comfortably: two days per city, with high-speed rail between them, and a free half-day for a health screening in Chengdu or Shanghai. Fourteen days allows a second-tier stop like Wuhan or Chongqing. Most of these experiences fit into a single itinerary without requiring separate trips.
What's the best city to start a first visit to China?
Shanghai is the most internationally familiar entry point, with widespread English signage, large connected airports, and a clear introduction to modern China. Beijing suits itineraries anchored around history. For business travel or a health-focused visit, Shenzhen is the most logistically direct: 40 minutes from Hong Kong by rail, international in character, and one of the five cities where Goji coordinates health screenings.
Is China safe to travel in as a foreigner?
China ranks among the lowest countries globally for street crime and personal safety incidents. The main practical adjustments for Western visitors are digital: use Apple Maps or Baidu Maps instead of Google, set up Alipay or WeChat Pay before you arrive, and install a VPN if you want access to home-country services. Emergency services are functional and responsive in all major cities.
What makes China different from most destinations
Most of the experiences on this list are available only in China at the price point and scale described. You can eat excellent street food elsewhere. You can see ancient sites elsewhere. But the combination is hard to find elsewhere: 350km/h trains connecting cities of ten million people, a healthcare system that's both excellent and dramatically cheaper than Western equivalents, and a food culture that varies completely between cities 500 kilometres apart.
The practical CTA from this list is straightforward: if you're visiting China for any reason, add a health screening to the itinerary. It takes a morning. The cost is a fraction of what you'd pay at home. The results are in your inbox within 48 hours. For anyone who has been putting off a comprehensive checkup because of cost, access, or wait times: the trip to China is already worth making for other reasons. The health check is one of the best uses of a free morning you're likely to find.
Rachel Hayes is a freelance writer and business consultant based in Austin, Texas. She has visited China six times since 2016, initially for tech industry work and increasingly out of preference.