7 days
A week: pick one shape and hold it
A week is enough for a serious first trip if you pick one shape and hold it. Here are the three shapes that work, and the ten existing 6–8 day routes behind them.
Itinerary planning
How many days do you actually need?
The three lengths travellers search for most — 7, 10 and 14 days — each have a shape that works and shapes that fail. Start from the number of days you have, and the rest of the trip falls out.
Plan by the days you have
Every planner below is backed by routes that already run
10 days
Ten days: the triangle plus one more thing
Ten days is where China trips stop being a dash. The triangle plus one soft add — Guilin, Chengdu, a Yangtze night — is the shape that most ten-day travellers are actually happiest with.
14 days
Two weeks: two routes, one trip
No single 14-day route covers China well — the strongest two-week trips are two of our routes joined at a hub city. Here are the combinations that add up, with the arithmetic on the table.
Shorter trips and other lengths
Where to look if your count is different
Four to five days
Under a week, pick a single city and its side trips — the regional routes in our library are built exactly for this. Start from the full route list and filter by region, or look at the Shanghai water-towns and Guilin plans first.
Longer than two weeks
Beyond 14 days, two things happen: Tibet becomes combinable with a second region, and the trip wants one long overland arc rather than more cities. Tell us the total count on the contact page and we will shape it against the routes that exist, rather than inventing days that do not.