China travel

China’s peak holiday travel season, often billed as the “the world’s biggest annual human migration,” has just kicked off. The season usually begins about two weeks before the Lunar New Year's Day, which falls on January 25 this year, and lasts around six weeks. Also called the Spring Festival, the holiday is the most important time of the year for families to get together, eat huge amounts of food and grill single relatives about their romantic prospects. In order to ease the epic annual travel crunch – a massive 3 billion in total trips, compared to the relatively puny 55 million Americans who traveled last Thanksgiving – the country’s sole railway operator has introduced electronic ticket

The United States sends the most tourists to China, and almost all of them go to Beijing. Tibet is high on many bucket lists, but few Western tourists ever actually visit. China virtually empties of Western tourists during November, December and January. These are some of the takeaways from the third annual report on popular travel destinations in China by The China Guide, a travel agency in Beijing that develops customized tours for travelers from the US, Germany, France, Spain, Britain, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. What immediately stands out from the report – compiled from surveys of 2,300 travelers from across the globe – is that Beijing dominates almost every foreign traveler’s iti

A 28-year-old man in China was ordered to pay $17,200 in damages to budget carrier Lucky Air for throwing coins at one of its planes in the hope of a safe journey last year. A court in Anhui province, in southeastern China, handed down the order in July, but it was only made public recently when the court posted the ruling online. Lu Chao, who was a first-time flier, admitted to throwing the coins at the plane for good luck as he boarded on February 17, 2019. The flight was canceled after airline staff found two 1 yuan coins on the ground near one of the plane’s engines. All passengers had to leave the plane and it was grounded while it underwent safety checks. Lucky Air had to arrange acco

Harbin Ice and Snow World, one of the world’s largest ice and snow theme parks, opened to the public in northeastern China on December 23, 2019. The frozen attraction in Heilongjiang province is linked to the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival which opens on January 5, 2020.

The Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival is the largest of its kind in the world. It held its official opening ceremony on Saturday. Here are some of the highlights from the festival, which runs through the end of February in Harbin, northeastern China.

The scenery in the mountaneous city of Zhangjiajie in central China is so otherworldly that it’s said to have inspired the alien moon Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. The city's Wulingyuan Scenic Area is a Unesco world heritage site and a source of pride for the Chinese government. Visit on a misty day, and you'll see the more than 3,000 sandstone pillars and peaks that resemble floating islands. But would you spend half of your monthly paycheck to see it? Us neither. A tour of the three main sights in the Zhangjiajie park currently costs more than $95. That’s about half the average monthly disposable income for a local resident. It’s a lot – Pandora or not. The high cost involved in seei