Product Description

INTRODUCTION China is not so much another country as another world. Cut off from the rest of Eurasia by the Himalayas to the south and the Siberian steppe to the north, it has grown up alone and aloof. The only foreigners it saw were visiting merchants from far-flung shores or uncivilized nomads from the wild steppe: peripheral, unimportant and unreal. Apart from a few ruling elites of Mongol and Manchu origin, who quickly became assimilated, China did not experience a significant influx of foreigners until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, something which still colours the experience of today's visitors to China.

While empires, languages, nations and entire peoples in the rest of the world have risen and blossomed - then disappeared without trace - China has spent the past two millennia largely recycling itself. The ferocious dragons and lions of Chinese statuary have been produced by Chinese craftsmen, with the same essentially Chinese characteristics, for 25 centuries or more, and the script still used today reached perfection at the time of the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago. It is as though the Roman empire had survived intact into the twenty-first century, with a billion people speaking a language as old as classical Latin. To say that the Chinese are presently enjoying better government than at any time in their recent history may not be saying much, but it is surely true. There is little sign of the Communist Party relinquishing power, or its control over the media. However, the negative stories surrounding today's China, the oppression of dissidents, the harsh treatment of criminal suspects and the imperialist behaviour towards Tibet and other minority regions, are only one part of the picture. Away from politics, the country is undergoing a huge commercial and creative upheaval. A country the size of ten Japans has entered the world market: Hong Kong-style skylines are being constructed in cities all across China, and tens of millions of people are finding jobs that earn them a spending power they have never known. The colossal historic fact of Hong Kong and Macau, the last European colonies, being returned to China in time for the new millennium, as though by celestial injunction, only adds ! to the sense that Chinese destiny is being restored to its rightful place at the centre of the world.

The sheer pace of change is visible in every part of Chinese life, from the economy to the still-young independent travel industry. Travellers who visited China as little as ten years ago are amazed to hear how much the place has opened up and how many more liberal trends have emerged in the wake of the late Deng Xiaoping's free market economics. For whatever reasons you are attracted to China - its history, art, culture, politics or simply its inaccessibility - the speed at which things are changing will ensure that your trip is a unique one.

The first thing that strikes visitors to China is the extraordinary density of population: central and eastern China do not have landscapes so much as peoplescapes. In the fertile plains, villages seem to merge into one another, while the big cities are endlessly sprawling affairs with the majority of their inhabitants living in cramped shacks or in depressingly uniform dormitory buildings. This doesn't mean that China is the same everywhere - there are many regional variations in people and language; indeed, some whole areas of the People's Republic are not populated by the "Chinese", but by so-called minority peoples, of whom there are more than two hundred distinct groups, ranging from the hill tribes of the south to the Muslims of the northwest. Nevertheless, the most enduring images of China are intrinsically Chinese ones: chopsticks, tea, slippers, massed bicycles, shadow-boxing, exotic pop music, karaoke, teeming crowds, Dickensian train stations, smoky temples, red fla! gs and the smells of soot and frying tofu - as well as the industrial vistas you would expect from one of the world's largest economies. Away from the cities, there is the sheer joy of crossing such a vast and ancient land - from the green paddy fields and misty hilltops of the south, to the mountains of Tibet, to the scorched, epic landscapes of the old Silk Road in the northwest. And the Chinese, despite a reputation for rudeness, are generally hospitable and friendly, though in the more out-of-the-way places travellers are still considered something of an oddity.

However, it would be wrong to pretend that it is an entirely easy matter to penetrate modern China. Borders are open, visas are readily distributed and the airports are teeming with foreigners, but the standard tourist "sights" - the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army - are relatively few considering the size of the country. Indeed, historic architecture is scant to say the least, and Chinese towns and cities lack that sense of history so palpable in the great cities of Europe or the Middle East. The Communists, like all dynasties before them, simply destroyed earlier showpieces. On top of this are the frustrations of travelling in a land where few people speak English and where foreigners are regularly viewed as exotic objects of intense curiosity, or fodder for overcharging.

When planning a journey through China, bear in mind that your trip is bound to involve an element of stress and hard work. If you have lots of cities on your itinerary, try to fit in some small towns as well, which tend to be cheaper as well as more relaxing. Don't stick exclusively to the famous places and sights; often your most interesting experiences will arise in places which least expect tourists. Above all, if it's your first visit, try not to be in too much of a hurry; take your time and be selective. If your budget is tight, think about staying in just a few places and getting to know them rather than undertaking lots of expensive and exhausting journeys. Even if money is less of a problem, you might do well to forego too much travel and opt instead for higher quality restaurants and hotels. Given the inevitable frustrations of making arrangements, flexibility is essential whatever your budget.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1876897 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1184 pages

Amazon.com Review
Travel guides are swell wherever, with museum tips here and restaurant recommendations there, but a great guidebook is essential in China. Independent Western travelers hang on their travel guide's every word for survival, and Rough Guide delivers, describing hotel, restaurant, and transportation details accurately and clearly. It also provides scads of information on culture, history, sights, dangers, pleasures, politics, health, weather, clothing, money, and customary niceties. The maps are excellent, and important phrases (hotels, destinations) are written in Chinese characters. And as a backpacker bonus, the book weighs a mere 1.3 pounds despite the thoroughness of its content.

Review
...in addition to all the essentials for any intrepid backpacker, there are many fascinating nuggets of historical and cultural background. -- Times Educational Supplement, London, UK

...the Rough Guide wants to dig below the surface and help readers through difficult situations... -- The Sunday Telegraph, London, UK

Best guidebook. -- Sunday Times, London, UK

By far the best guide. -- Financial Times, London, UK

Packed with information, critical and nicely written. -- The Times, London, UK

Tells it like it is. . . fulfils its promise of presenting China in its contemporary context. -- The Times, London, UK

The most thorough and stimulating practical guide to the country. -- Elle Decoration

From the Publisher
China is not so much another country as another world. It did not get a significant influx of foreigners until the late nineteenth century, something which still colours the experience of today's visitors, for whom a guidebook, with Chinese translations of place names, hotels and restaurants, is an absolute necessity. Updated once again by its team of experienced authors, the Rough Guide is the essential handbook.

Customer Reviews

Leave this book on the store shelves!
I found this to be a very poor excuse of a guidebook. It contains many, many, many errors, both factual and incorrectly spelled words.

Case in point #1: the guide has the Zhengzhou airport 3 km from the town center. Not so -- it's a 40-minute airport bus ride away. Had I not been to Zhengzhou before and known the correct distance, I would have missed my plane because I wouldn't have left for the airport in time.

#2: In Beijing, it lists the China National Art Museum (it uses Gallery, but it's Museum now) as one place where you can catch the airport bus to Capital Airport. The airport bus stop is actually a block away in a little hole-in-the-wall office with NO signs in English to identify it. Unless you are able to speak Chinese, forget about leaving from here because you'll never find the place.

#3: The translations they give for some phrases, while possibly not incorrect, are not ones used by the average Chinese person. In fact, my Chinese friends laughed at their translations.

#4: Wrong price information. While no one expects a guidebook to have the most current prices, they should be somewhere in the ballpark for newly published guides. This guide only came out this year, but prices, especially those at attractions, were as much as three times what Rough said they were.

#5: I never did find some of the places listed in the guide that I wanted to visit. The maps aren't that great, and it fails to give street addresses for some sites (maybe all of them -- I only looked for ones in the cities I just visited). An example, it said in Zhengzhou there are old (now closed) and new provincial museums. It said taxi drivers may take you to the old, but does not give an address for the new museum so you can have the driver take you there to begin with.

#6: Their hotel recommendations aren't that great. I stayed in two of them; one which is described as clean and cozy was in fact filthy, and I found I preferred to use public toilets in the street rather than the one in my hotel room.

And I don't even want to get into the mistakes about Beijing, where I lived for two years.

All in all, I was very disappointed in this guide. It may be OK for someone who's never been to China and wouldn't recognize the mistakes, but for someone who has lived and/or traveled widely in China, as I have, it's pretty worthless. I would have been better off taking my six-year-old Lonely Planet back with me. The information it contains could be no worse than what's in this Rough Guide.

Fine tuning of Rough Guide China, but a bit more needed
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 Guanxi as incorporated in Guizhou province, Anhui not named on the map at p470, Macau omitted from the table of contents. An important error is the map on p898, showing the "Desert Highway" across the Taklamakan as joining the southern highway at Khotan, more than three hundred kilometres west of the actual junction, which is east of Minfeng (Niya).

I would have liked to see more attention to the regional maps rather than the twelve pages of pictures. The maps are, on the whole for their given scope, reasonably well done, fitting in well with the text. Their scale bars are sometimes awry, and maps of adjoining regions are sometimes incompatible - most notably the map of the north-west, which does not fit with the other maps at any scale.

So now I come to another special plea. Planning a trip through several regions calls for an overall map. In times gone by, fold-out or loose sheet maps were sometimes provided with guidebooks. Perhaps the practice was abandoned on the grounds of cost; it was not abandoned for lack of usefulness. Of course separate maps are available, but they are much less useful than a map would be if specially prepared for a particular guidebook - less useful because they include so many places not mentioned in the book, omit some that are, and in China may even use different names. After wrestling with adjustments to scales different from those indicated by scale bars I produced a single map of China from the regional maps in the new Rough Guide, and a most useful map it is for use in conjunction with the book.

When next I travel to China, the new edition of the Rough Guide will be the one I shall take, supplemented where needed and possible by information from other sources. ()

Among the very best for this unique world called China.
The question is not how do you cover the world's largest and most populated country (as big as all the countries of Europe combined), but rather, how do you visit such a vast, multi cultured world as China? The first step is to arm oneself with the best travel guides on the market. "China: The Rough Guide" is one such guide.

"China: The Rough Guide" is designed for those that have more than a week or two in China. It is NOT a pocket guide (almost 2 lbs.) and more than 1100 pages. In this tome, Leffman, Lewis & Atiyah captures the best of China and give you the low down on what you must see while in China

Straight off the introduction in this guide is one of the most engaging I have ever read, "China is not so much another country as another world; chopsticks, tea, slippers, massed bicycles, shadow boxing, exotic pop music, karakoe, teeming crowds, Dickensian train stations . . . one of the world's largest economies." The maps (a critical element in any guide) are among the best found in a guide to date. Each restaurant and accommodation that is listed in the guide is marked on the maps (ya gotta love it).

The terse 3000-year history is as well written as objective as history can be, and thorough enough for most visitors. There is an outstanding appendix section, titled: "Context," covering, besides history, architecture, art, film, music and an excellent book list. The recommendations for accommodations and restaurants are reliable and up to date.

However, this is not a perfect guide (5 stars). One of the weak areas of the guide is the omission of an accommodation or a restaurant index. Thus, if you have a recommended restaurant you want to look up, you have to go through all the restaurant pages 'til you stumble across the name you seek or miss seeing it completely.

Another significant shortcoming is the lack of website and email addresses for hotels. Phone and fax numbers are provided but, considering the cost, nothing beats email. This is a significant omission, especially considering that the guide has a 2000 publishing date and most major Chinese hotels are now Internet connected,

Though the 'Basic Section' is up to guide books' standards, and has a few interesting sections (i.e., recommended tours, China Online Etc.) I found some of the information needed updating. Northwest Airlines is NOT the only airline that flies non-stop from mainland US to China, United Airlines also does (though the service is sub-par and the seats very cramped, I would not-recommended you flying UAL). Also, there is NO website information for any of the airlines.

I am disappointed that the 'boxed' vignettes are few and far between in this guide. There is no mention of Falun Gong and only a scant mention of the Three River Gorge Dam. Usually Rough Guides are much better in this area.

Finally, an ongoing peeve that I have about Rough Guides, is the use of a number system to quote the price range of a hotel, i.e., the `Friendship Hotel' is listed to cost a '6'. For a `6' you have to flip back to the numeric legion where you find out that `6' = 600 to 800 yuans, which you then divide by the current rate of exchange. As other guides simply demonstrate, there are better ways to help your reader gage approximate cost.

If you are going to just be in and around Beijing or Shanghai then this guide at 1100 pages may be an over kill. You would be better off with Rough Guide: Beijing, Cadogan's Beijing or Lonely Planet Shanghai (all highly recommended guides, see my reviews). However if you are going to explore this great country then 'China: The Rough Guide' will be a welcome companion. Recommended