Customer Reviews
excellent guide book - By: Ms. F. M. Mathieson, 10 Oct 2008 
I have just returned from china in which i spent three months there teaching & travelling. This was my first time travelling & the book was fantastic!! Alot of details & information for even the obscurest places in china. There was only one place i visted that wasn't in the lonely planet. It helped with language barrier aswell due to a lot of the places i went to were in chinese characters in the book. I will stick with the lonely planet guides when I travel in the future. Also much better than rough guide!
Disappointing for a lonely planet - By: E. Rivoire, 05 Oct 2006 
I normallly swear by Lonely Planet guidebooks & didn't think twice about buying the China guide. However, I found that some of the practical information (which is normallly so reliable in Lonely Planet guides) was thin on the ground as well as sometimes misleading (there was a subway stop on the Beijing map which didn't exist & some of the phone numbers for hostels in Xi'an were incorrect). What disappointed me the most however was that a lot of the sights descriptions /background info have clearly been copied from signs displaying onsite. I found that I had to take a tour guide on several occasions to get a less superficial overview of the place I was visiting. A big disappointment then although basic info is covered & will alllow you to get from A to B.
2005 Edition terribly out of date and misleading to boot - By: R. Bowley, 12 Jul 2006 
I have literallly (yesterday) just left China after spending 2 months there using the latest Lonely Planet edition & reallly believe I would have had a much better time if I hadn't chosen this book. I appreciate that China is changing at an incredible rate, but much of the information is clearly up to 10 years out of date (2005 edition remember). The only changes from the previous edition appear to be different photos & a better map. Its not just that's its out of date though, it was also misleading in many cases. The supposedly best hostel in Guixhou province had a tap over a stinking bathtub for a shower & a toilet that did not flush (nice owners though)!
Other examples:
Lonely Planet: Dali in Kunming is the only place to get away & have a holiday from travelling.
Reality: You will be harassed every minute you walk down the street by traders & people trying to sell you Marijuana. It's a tourist Mecca for Chinese & foreigners alike.
Lonely Planet: Longsheng in Guanxi is the centre of a colourful mix of local Dong & Miao minority people.
Reality: The only colour you'll see is the pink lights advertising the ladies of the night that line the streets. It's a very modern city that would not have matched a description like that in the last 15-20 years. (Another recent guidebook we saw had a much more accurate description)
Another criticism is that the information on Tibet is sparse as they want to sell you their Tibet guide book (The latest Rough Guide to China had at least twice as much on Tibet). They also plug their Mandarin Phrase Book in the language section.
I appreciate you might think that this sounds like whinging, but I have been travelling for over 9 months now & used many guidebooks in that time. What I do not appreciate is publishers bringing out new editions with so little new or updated information. Their only motive is to sell more books.
I strongly suggest researching & comparing any travel guide book before you buy as you can't change it easily once you're away & certainly do not just go for Lonely Planet because they're the biggest.
Fantastic country - By: Ben, 26 Jun 2006 
A great general guide but watch out for a number of things.
1. Prices change at a phenomenal rate in China. We arrived in China with the older edition & two weeks later the new one came out. By that stage the price for accomodation & events as listed in the new guide had dramaticallly increased in some places by large amounts making it very hard to get around.
2. They say that you need to book travel days in advance & through hotels or CITC. In reality we rarely had problems getting tickets for sleepers even on the day of departure. If you are going to be in the town for less than three days buy your ticket before you leave the station if you can. CITC will charge you loads of commission although they did get us out of a jam accomodation wise in Datong at 10pm one night.
3. Buy the LP Chinese quide & use it rather than the useless guide in the book. My wife would copy out the characters in the book for the basics whenever we needed to buy train tickets & this usuallly got us through even in the most backward station.
4. Enjoy yourselves
ok for general info - By: kazu, 02 Jun 2006 of course it can't cover everything, considering its a little book about a big place. quite handy for a few things but not reallly worth carrying around. the phrase book is terribly confusing. it isnt in pinyin, with the idea that english speakers would prefer english style spelling. LP forgets that alot of people are not english mother tongue & have to get their heads round the english style spelling first, then to say it in what is hopefully chinese!!! it reallly didnt work for me. better to leave it in pinyin for alll to learn & understand. Shanghai was a complete waste of time to read. the restaurants, etc guide was so utterly touristy i felt it was being aimed at 3-5star tourists! not 1 mention of any good places i'd been to. alll the good info the book gives can easily be found on the internet, savin having to carry it around.
