About TravelChina

TravelChina answers the two-months-before-your-trip questions that booking engines can't: which station to use, how long it really takes, what it costs, and whether the train beats flying. Trip.com and 12306 will sell you a ticket once you know what you want. This site helps you figure out what you want.

What this site covers

• 24 cities in scope — the destinations first-time and second-time visitors to China actually go to, not the full 300+ network. We deliberately leave out transit hubs that aren't worth a stop as destinations in their own right.
• 36 city-pair routes with published data — duration band, price range by class (2nd / 1st / business), daily train count, first and last departure, train-vs-flight door-to-door comparison.
• Interactive tools. The HSR map is the main one — pick two cities and it gives you the full picture in under two clicks. More tools will be added over time.
• A growing library of deep-dive guides — booking walkthroughs, network reference, and per-route articles. See the guides index.

How the data is compiled

Schedules, prices, train frequencies and station metadata are sampled monthly from China's national rail booking system and cross-checked against Trip.com listings. Each object exposes a last_verified date so you can see how fresh it is.

Station notes (metro lines, travel time to city centre, foreigner tips) come from a mix of operator publications and on-the-ground field notes. Where something is opinion rather than fact — the scenic rating on a route, or whether a flight actually beats a train door-to-door — that's editorial judgement, and we'll usually say so explicitly.

One real caveat: schedules and prices drift day-to-day by around 10 %, and by more around Chinese New Year and the October Golden Week. For live availability, always follow the booking link — our data is a planning aid, not a live feed.

What this site is NOT

• Not a booking agent. We don't touch your payment. Every "Book on Trip.com" button is an affiliate link to the actual OTA, where the transaction happens on their infrastructure with their customer service.
• Not a Trip.com competitor on coverage. Trip.com covers 300+ cities and every corner of the network. We cover 24 by design, each one deeply.
• Not real-time data. Monthly refresh, explicit freshness dates on every data point. If you need the exact seat count for tomorrow's 7:42 train, use the booking site.
• Not affiliated with any Chinese government body or rail operator. We're an independent editorial project. Data sources are public.

Updates

The goal is one new city-pair deep-dive per month and a full data refresh across all routes on the same cadence. You'll see the freshness date on the footer of each data-heavy page, and on the top of every article.

Feedback

Spotted a wrong price, a changed station, a missing train — or just a sentence that reads badly? A public feedback channel is coming. In the meantime, if you're reading this from a pre-launch preview, you already know how to reach the editor.