What I Learned from Traveling Across China

Before I set off for China, my friends fell into two camps. One group said, “You have to go. It is a world entirely unlike our own.” The others frowned and asked, “Why not Europe? China is so far away, and you don’t speak the language.”

I sided with the former. Once I actually set foot in China, I understood that the country could not be summed up by the simple word “different.” It was a place that recalibrated the way I saw the world.

Stop One: Shattered Assumptions

Growing up in Europe, my idea of what counted as “ancient” stretched back roughly two hundred years. Standing before the Colosseum in Rome, I was already awestruck by a two-thousand-year-old structure. Yet when I stood beneath the city walls of Xi’an, our tour guide casually remarked, “This dates back to the Ming Dynasty, about six hundred years ago.” He then gestured into the distance and added, “Over there are Tang Dynasty ruins, more than a thousand years old.”

In that moment, I realised how narrow my sense of time had been.

What struck me even more powerfully was that this antiquity was not confined to museums. In China, history is alive. In city parks at dawn, elderly locals practise tai chi, their movements resembling those depicted in paintings centuries ago. In Chengdu’s teahouses, bamboo chairs, covered-bowl tea, and ear-cleaning artisans can make time feel as though it has stood still. Walking along the covered corridors once used by Ming and Qing literati in Suzhou’s classical gardens, I watched bamboo shadows fall across the paths much as they must have centuries ago.

Nowhere else had I experienced such a vivid coexistence of past and present. China does not simply lock its history behind glass display cases; it allows history to breathe within everyday life.

Stop Two: Speed and Order

Before travel China, I carried stereotyped notions of what a “developing country” ought to look like. Stepping out of Beijing Daxing International Airport, I was stunned by its futuristic atmosphere. Then came the high-speed rail. I travelled the 1,300 kilometres from Beijing to Shanghai in just four and a half hours.

That was faster than the London-to-Edinburgh journey, even though the distance between Beijing and Shanghai is nearly twice as long.

Equally surprising was the sense of order. During rush hour at Shanghai People’s Square Metro Station, huge crowds moved along the escalators while many passengers followed the familiar “stand right, walk left” convention. People flowed through transfers as if guided by invisible channels, with surprisingly little pushing or chaos.

Mobile payments, shared bicycles, and food-delivery services—ordinary parts of daily life for many Chinese people—struck me as examples of large-scale systems working remarkably smoothly. How can a country of more than a billion people operate so many aspects of daily life with such speed and coordination? The question still fascinates me.

Stop Three: Culinary Adventure

If anything can break down cultural barriers, it is food. Before coming to China, I thought I knew Chinese cuisine: General Tso’s chicken, stir-fried noodles, and spring rolls. I soon discovered that these belonged to an entirely different culinary universe.

In Chengdu, I learned that the numbing-and-spicy sensation known as mala is not merely a flavour, but an almost addictive physical experience that borders on pain. In Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter, I followed the locals’ example, tearing flatbread into small pieces before adding it to my soup. My fingers grew sore, yet I enjoyed every minute of it.

Sitting in a Guangzhou dim-sum restaurant, surrounded by bamboo steamers filled with shrimp dumplings, siu mai, and chicken feet, I realised that breakfast could be a two-hour social ritual. At Quanjude in Beijing, watching chefs carve paper-thin slices of Peking duck before my eyes showed me what true culinary craftsmanship could mean.

The essence of Chinese cuisine lies not necessarily in rare ingredients, but in the boundless creativity with which ordinary ingredients are transformed. A single fish can be steamed, braised in soy sauce, prepared sweet and sour, simmered in a spicy broth, topped with chopped chilli, or grilled.

This reverence for food, combined with such extraordinary culinary imagination, reshaped my understanding of what cooking can be.

Stop Four: Human Warmth

The language barrier was real. I could say little beyond “hello” and “thank you,” so I relied mostly on hand gestures and translation apps. Oddly enough, I rarely felt truly helpless.

In Hangzhou, an older woman who spoke no English noticed me staring helplessly at my map. She took me by the arm and walked several blocks with me until she had led me all the way to my destination. Then she simply turned and left.

At a hot-pot restaurant in Chongqing, the owner noticed that I was dining alone. He sat down across from me and patiently taught me how to blanch tripe—“dip it seven times, then lift it seven times”—as if he were teaching a child to ride a bicycle.

In Dunhuang, a university student volunteered to translate the explanations at a historical site for me. We exchanged WeChat accounts and still share snippets of our daily lives.

These small moments taught me that human warmth in China can be a language that needs no translation. It is a simple instinct: “You are in my country, so I will look after you.”

Those moments have remained in my memory even more vividly than many of the tourist attractions I visited.

Stop Five: The Beginning of Understanding

China is by no means perfect. Air quality can sometimes be poor, popular scenic spots can become unbearably crowded, and some differences in hygiene standards took a little getting used to as a foreign visitor.

Yet these imperfections also make the experience feel real.

Why travel to China? Not because it is flawless, but because it is profoundly different. And this difference is not merely superficial exoticism; it can expand the way you see the world.

Once you become accustomed to the rhythms of Europe, the efficiency of North America, or the laid-back pace found in parts of Southeast Asia, China offers another possibility: an alternative way of seeing how an ancient civilisation can modernise at breathtaking speed while maintaining deep connections with its cultural roots.

As you travel across China, your assumptions are challenged, overturned, and reimagined every day. You begin to see that societies can function differently, that everyday life can be organised in different ways, and that modernisation does not have to follow a single predetermined model.

So why visit China?

I would answer this way: nowhere else have I experienced the strange sensation of touching two-thousand-year-old stone masonry one moment and scanning a QR code to buy bubble tea the next.

That feeling of stepping through a time warp, the coexistence of seemingly contradictory elements, and those constant moments of “How can this be?” and “I never imagined this!”—that is what travel is all about.

And China is where I experienced that feeling most intensely.