Imperial China & the Timeless Yangtze

Tour Highlights

• Stand among the Terracotta Army pits in Xi'an, where thousands of figures wait in formation
• Five-star hotels for every land night of the trip
• Smaller groups: we cap bookings at 28 travellers
• Tiananmen Square, the national stage in the middle of Beijing
• The Forbidden City, on the UNESCO World Heritage list, with a Temple of Heaven visit to fall back on if palace tickets run out
• Walk a stretch of China's Great Wall at Juyong Pass
• Peking Duck on the lunch menu, with vegetarian plates available
• A pedicab ride through Beijing's hutong lanes, and dinner at a family table

Itinerary at a Glance

1. Day 1: Flying out from Australia and New Zealand to Xi'an — Your trip opens with a long-haul flight to Xi'an, with meals served on board. Once you land, a driver waits in the arrivals hall and takes you straight to the hotel, so the first hours are about sleep
2. Day 2: The Terracotta Army near Xi'an — Take the morning at an easy pace, then head out to the pits where the clay soldiers were excavated, a short drive from the city. Thousands of figures stand close to life size in the trenches — infantr
3. Day 3: Xi'an to Beijing — The Small Wild Goose Pagoda has stood inside the grounds of Jianfu Temple for over thirteen centuries, a survivor of the scholarship and exchange that once flowed along the trade routes, and it carrie
4. Day 4: Tiananmen Square, then the Forbidden City — Beijing's imperial core comes first today. You cross Tiananmen Square, which is genuinely enormous and still carries the weight of every ceremony and announcement staged there, then walk north into th
5. Day 5: The Great Wall at Juyong Pass — The wall is the afternoon's business, but the morning belongs to jade: a museum visit covering how this stone has been prized in China for millennia, with carvers at work in front of you. Lunch is Pek
6. Day 6: Beijing to Suzhou by rail — The morning goes to 'Tongrentang', a traditional health centre in Beijing where the staff explain what Chinese medicine looks for — balance in the body, herbal remedies, acupuncture, prevention — and
7. Day 7: Suzhou's gardens and canals, then Shanghai — Suzhou has been a trading city since 514 BC, and water has always been its working life: the canals carried silk, goods and people, and the city still gets compared with Venice because of it. You see
8. Day 8: Shanghai History Museum and half a day in town — Start indoors. Shanghai History Museum lays out the city's past in sequence, and then the afternoon is spent on foot, taking in Yu Garden, first laid out more than four centuries ago, along with Xinti
9. Day 9: Shanghai to Yichang, boarding the Yangtze cruise — Most of today is a rail day: the high-speed run from Shanghai to Yichang takes about 6.5 hours, and the view shifts from the flat Yangtze delta to the hills that mark the edge of the gorges. Once you
10. Day 10: Ashore at Three Gorges Dam, then Xiling Gorge — Breakfast on board, then ashore for the excursion people talk about afterwards: Three Gorges Dam, sixty storeys high, more than a mile wide, and the largest power station on the planet. The guides wil
11. Day 11: Shennong Stream and Wu Gorge, then Qutang Gorge — You swap boats this morning for Shennong Stream, a side trip on a smaller craft that takes you into a channel far narrower than the main river, with the cliffs hanging close on both sides. Back aboard
12. Day 12: Snow Jade Cave — Snow Jade Cave is unusual among Chinese caves for its colour: the calcite here is white, so the formations look washed in milk rather than the usual browns and yellows. The walk covers 1,644 metres an
13. Day 13: Chongqing to Guilin, and Elephant Trunk Hill — After breakfast you leave the ship in Chongqing and take the high-speed train to Guilin, trading gorges for karst country. On the way into the city, stop at Elephant Trunk Hill, the limestone arch tha
14. Day 14: Yangshuo, Fuli and a raft on the Li River — Chuanshan Park is the morning's first stop, one of the city's green spaces, and then you drive south towards Yangshuo. The river trip is made by bamboo raft, low to the water, with the karst towers st
15. Day 15: Homeward from Guilin to Australia and New Zealand — You fly home from Guilin today. What happens in between depends on how the return is ticketed: if the routing puts you in Shanghai for eight hours or longer, a sightseeing tour is provided at no extra
16. Day 16: Arriving home in Australia and New Zealand — You land back home this morning, sixteen days on from Xi'an, with the Yangtze, the wall and a whole clay army behind you.

What's Included

• Return international flights in economy class on a full-service airline
• Four legs of high-speed rail in one direction each, or a domestic flight where rail seats are not held
• Ten nights in five-star hotels across Xi'an, then Beijing, Suzhou and Shanghai, finishing in Guilin
• Sheraton Xi'an Hotel, equivalent if needed
• Wyndham Beijing North, equivalent if needed
• Renaissance Suzhou Wujiang, equivalent if needed
• Radisson Collection Yangtze Shanghai, equivalent if needed
• Guilin Lijiang Waterfall Hotel, equivalent if needed
• 22 meals, with breakfast every day
• Four lunches, one of them Peking Duck
• Four dinners, among them a home-cooked meal in a hutong house and the Captain's Dinner
• Air-conditioned private transport throughout
• High-speed rail on four sectors between cities
• Airport transfers at both ends of the tour