The Rough Guide to China 4

Using solely this book as our guide, my girlfriend and I navigated Beijing, Xian, Guilin, Yangshuo, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong completely on our own without getting lost once. The maps are absolute life-savers (though they would be even more useful if they included the Chinese characters for the street names), the descriptions of place generally current and accurate (though they might have mentioned that, as of May of 2006, Yangshuo is no longer a mecca of calm and relaxation but rather a maddening gauntlet of pushy vendors and tourists), and it even provided enjoyable reading material on the long train rides. A lot of people in the anti-tour-group set go with Lonely Planet for whatever reason, but I'm very glad I picked this one up. Next trip: RUSSIA -- I'm picking up the Rough Guide for it now.

The Rough Guides are considered among the "cream of the crop" in the guidebook world, and this book is no exception. I used it extensively in the planning phase of my recent month-long trip to China, and it was very helpful.The background sections of the book are outstanding, giving the reader a solid overview of Chinese history and culture. The primary sites of interest to travelers are adequately covered as well, and so the book is very helpful in planning one's itinerary.The main drawback of the volume is it's weight. If you are backpacking in China, as I was, this book is pretty heavy to be lugging around. Therefore, unless you are staying in China more than a couple of weeks, you might consider looking at the smaller city guides.....or ripping the necessary sections out of this book and packing only those in your rucksack.Highly recommended for pre-trip planning at home. Recommended for packing and taking to China *if* you are going on an extended trip to the country.

I traveled extensively throughout China in 1998, and I found the roughguide a much more practical book for getting around. The charts inside the guide allow you to find the information quickly, whereas the other popular guide forces you to flip through pages with apparent random entires of Chinese Characters, which can be frustrating and stressful when you climb into a chinese taxi in the middle of the road, and you need to show the driver where you want to go. Although lonely planet seems to have more detailed information, the well organized layout of the Roughguide makes it ten times more desireable when your actually on the road. I'm looking forward to the new edition, as I left my roughguide in China with a friend who only had a lonely planet!

The second edition of this outstanding guidebook has been produced by people who were rightly content in general terms with the style and content of the first. Twelve pages of colour photographs have been added - calculated more to increase sales than to be of use to the traveller on the road.Of the three sections, Part One, The Basics and Part Three, Contexts, are little changed. Between them, Part Two, The Guide, at 1005 pages is 76 pages longer. Regions which get an increase of twenty per cent or more are Dongbei, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hong Kong and Macau.A few new routes have been added, including the roads from Chengdu to Shaanxi and from Mangshi south-east along the Burma border. The book notes the opening of western Sichuan and north-western Yunnan, but unfortunately and oddly provides little information about these important regions. In fact there is very little mention of a vast tract stretching generally south from the Xining-Lhasa road, through Qinghai, the Tibetan "Autonomous" Region and western Sichuan to north-western Yunnan.Although that region warrants much more attention, it is inevitable that there will be some substantial regions that do receive little or no attention. All of north-eastern Sichuan/Chongqing, for example, is a blank. Perhaps it deserves to be; but a traveller is unlikely to find out unless he ventures there and explores for himself. This raises another unfortunate omission - any comprehensive account of which parts of China are still closed to foreign visitors without special permits. That matter is of little importance to travellers wishing to visit the "sights" listed in this guidebook, because few of those "sights" are in closed areas. That is, I expect, why the whole matter of what is closed amounts almost to a non-issue for the popular guidebooks. But it is certainly of importance to the traveller who, having reached this or that province with the help of a guidebook, wishes to go off to see what is in one of the blank areas. Comprehensive lists of what is closed are available, but hard to get, and available nowhere that I know of in English. Such a list, or better still a map of China showing the counties which are closed would be invaluable. That is exactly the kind of information that a guidebook of this kind should provide. The great majority of the changes in this edition are in the detail - admission prices, opening hours, accommodation addresses and prices. Whether the new information is accurate will have to wait for on-the-road testing. But the very large number of detailed changes suggests that the revision has been thorough.There is, of course, the usual and almost inevitable smattering of errors - Dehong described as an "Autonomous Region" (it is an autonomous prefecture) at page 810, Hubei abutting Sichuan (p503: it used to, but not since Chongqing was excised from Sichuan province in about 1997), the map on p773 showing part of Gu

The book describes in detail almost everything one needs to know about going to China. From reccomending large 5 star hotels to Yurts in out of the way villages, the Rough Guide helps you get there the way you want to get there. The guide is so detailed that it even reccomended a small village in the middle of Inner Mongolia called Zhaohe. I went there and found it to be what the guide promised...out of the way and no tourists. Invaluable information such as this makes traveling in an already crowded China more rewarding and interesting.