China Adventure Tours: Pandas & Wildlife, Biking & Trekking, Festivals & Culture, and More

Our China adventure tours are as diverse as this massive and mulifaceted country itself. Explore ancient temples, roam bustling cities, visit colorful festivals, and come face-to-face with hidden tribes!

In the village of Xi’an, China, legions of life-size terracotta warriors, who guarded the tomb of Qin Shi Huang two thousand years ago, now stand in a mausoleum. Known as the “Terracotta Army,” these denizens — numbering more than eight thousand — have become a symbol of China as much as the Great Wall.

But China isn’t all hard lines and ancient sculptures. There is a “softer” side to the country, too, that is just as iconic and shorthand for the whole nation: the Silk Road and woolly-furred panda bears.

The Silk Road once crisscrossed China with a web of highways for transporting goods and knowledge between Europe and the East. Today, on your own China tour, you can trace one of the road’s most important branches — all the way from Moscow to Beijing — on a singular journey aboard a Golden Eagle luxury train: the Shangri-La Express.

If you’d rather tour China on two wheels, biking through the countryside is an off-the-beaten-path way to experience one of the world’s most ancient civilizations and its many microcultures. By this simple mode of transport, you can travel to remote hamlets and expansive fields of rice and sugarcane, all the way to bustling cities, such as Zhaoqing and Wuzhou. As a biker, you’re free to visit farming families in their homes or interact with the children who rush out to greet you — Westerners on bikes are an unusual sight in China.

Although not as well “advertised” as Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City, China’s great rivers and mountain ranges dominate much of its topography. Dwindling bamboo forests are still home to endangered giant pandas, although rapid development is altering and threatening many of the nation’s ecosystems and untouched places. While the chance of finding a giant panda in the wild has essentially vanished, you can see them in a close-to-natural setting at the Bifengxia Panda Base, the largest captive giant panda institution in the world.

The China of a Terracotta Army and a Great Wall is ancient and magnificent, on a grand scale. But the rural-natural China — with its local hospitality, tea ceremonies, serene gardens, and rare bears — also has much import. Make sure your adventures in China encompass both the nation’s hard lines and soft spots.

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