ChinApps
A traveller's guide to China
Arriving in Mainland China? Paying, getting around, even ordering dinner all work differently
here, and the things that catch people out are rarely the things they planned for.
ChinApps is a written guide for first-time visitors: what to expect when you land, what's worth
sorting out before you fly, and what to say when you get there.
What's inside
- Six guides — how paying really works when your card is foreign, why your usual map is quietly wrong here, ordering from a QR code with no paper menu, and what to do if something goes wrong
- A trip plan with real timings — set your departure date and see what needs doing when. Railway identity verification genuinely takes days; registering a messaging account is far easier before you leave
- An offline phrasebook — forty phrases with characters, pinyin and spoken Mandarin, working with no signal at all: underground, in a taxi, in a restaurant
- Holiday warnings — set your dates and ChinApps tells you if they fall inside a national holiday. Golden Week and Spring Festival put hundreds of millions of people on the move at once, and most first-time visitors book straight into one without knowing
- An address card — your hotel address in Chinese characters, shown full screen to a taxi driver. Showing written characters works where saying the name does not
- A medical card — blood type, allergies, conditions, medication and who to call, every line labelled in Chinese, plus the emergency numbers that work from a phone with no SIM. Held on your phone only
No account, no tracking, and free.
Android — coming soon