Help with a trip to China please

Help !!!!
DL the Elder and my brother ( Nessy) have some flights booked to China next year with BA in F ( in to Beijing out of Shanghai) using DLTEs 241.
Now China is not an area of the world I have any expertise in and whilst the flights booked were booked to potentially accomodate a Tailor Made itinerary ( that has been priced up ) I’m wondering what the alternatives may be ?
Is it possible to use a Chinese agency / tour operator ( or even booking stuff when they get there) or are they better off using a UK based agency with everything arranged before they leave.
DLTE has been to China on an organised tour ( many many years ago) but this will be Nessy’s first trip . Only things that are “ must does “ for him out of the Beijing/ Shanghai city areas are Terracotta Warriors and The Great Wall.
Is a river cruise worth the sidestep ? DLTE didn’t bother last time and neither is bothered by the pandas ( which DLTE has already seen)
Visas seem to be a bit of a nightmare too ( with lots of conflicting advice) so I’d be grateful for any advice from those with greater knowledge here ( and I know a few of you visit frequently / live there).
DLTE is still pretty sprightly ( given she’s gone 80) and in good health.

Thanks in advance
DL

Hello

Hopefully I can help, I came back from China just six weeks ago with my girlfriend. We spent ten days doing a triangle from Shanghai, to Xi'an, to Beijing and then back to Shanghai.

I'll try and address some of your points.

We did not use a tour operator or agency to plan our trip. To be honest it was fairly straightforward to put it together ourselves. Though of course if they want piece of mind then they can explore that option.

In terms of your must haves, we booked a Great Wall trip using a guide we booked via Viator. For the Terracotta Warriors - again, we booked our own private tour guide via TripAdvisor. I'd be happy to link you to them if you are interested. In terms of getting around - we took the trains, they were very good, very punctual and very clean as you might expect. It was lovely to sit and look out of the window as China goes past. You can take the bullet train between Beijing and Shanghai, it takes about 4 and a half hours.

I'm afraid I have no idea at all about a River Cruise!

Onto Visas. We both needed a Visa for our 10 day stay. You need to provide quite a lot of information up front about your trip (flights, hotel bookings, insurance, and so on) but overall the process was not very laborious. Even using a postal application we got our passports back in six days. Impressive!

I feel as though I haven't gone into much detail, mostly because I am not sure how much detail you need - but if you want me to elaborate on anything please ask, I'd be happy to expand on it!

Thanks Slimpy - that’s exactly the sort of thing I need to know. No such thing as too much information . Links to services you’ve used would be great.
Are you able to pre-book trains in the UK or can you only book them whilst in China? Did you travel by plane or train to Xian ( fwiw Nessy would much rather travel by trsin than by plane !) ?
Any advice on hotels would be great too
The whole visa thing has completely confused me so an idiots guide ie how and when would be great if that’s possible ?
The three of us travelled in Japan independently a few years ago when VS still flew into NRT ( and I did post some reports here to try and help others) but China seems to be way more complex !
Thanks ,
DL

Of course!

This was our tour operator for the Terracotta Soldiers. It was a private tour so no other people involved and it included lunch: https://www.viator.com/tours/Xian/Priva ... 6-37001P32

And here was the operator for the Great Wall - this was a group tour of maybe 15 people, to a much quieter part of the wall which was very nice as we were there quite early in the morning. https://www.urbanadventures.com/Beijing ... experience

We travelled entirely by Train - and you can book them here in the UK. We used www.travelchinaguide.com - which in itself has tons of information about tourism in China, it's very comprehensive. If you do go by train, I'd recommend the first class seats as the second class seats are rather small!! That website also has information about larger group tours around various cities, which you may want to read about if you're still considering that option. There were no problems at all in getting the tickets from the website.
The tickets can be collected at the train stations, or I believe that website can post them to your hotel.

As for hotels - they are plentiful. If you end up in Xi'an, I would highly recommend Eastern House. When you arrive/check-in at the hotels your passport is checked for a valid Visa. So keep it handy as no Visa = no hotel!

So for Visas, here is the website for the Chinese Visa Application Service Centre: http://bio.visaforchina.org/LON2_EN/
I'd highly recommend reading the step-by-step guide.
The Visas were rather fiddly. You have to fill in an electronic copy of a PDF form, they no longer accept hand-written ones. You need to do one form per person. You also need to include a passport style photo, which we had to go to a Timpson to do as the UK passport photo sizes are not accepted. We were able to print these out forms, and post them to the embassy along with confirmations of our hotels, flights, travel insurance, payment forms, photocopies of our passports, and so on. They didn't ask for anything outrageous, just quite a lot of stuff.
On a side note - it seems British passport holders are being issued with 2 year, multiple entry Visas regardless of what you ask for on the form, so that was a nice surprise!

I think that's covered most things! Again, do let me know if you need more.