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| Lonely Planet China | 
 enlarge | Authors: Damian Harper, Andrew Burke, Julie Grundvig
Brand: Sheila Shine
Category: Book
List Price: $31.99
Buy New: $20.00
You Save: $11.99 (37%)
Buy New/Used from $13.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (90 reviews)
Sales Rank: 11737
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 10th
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1028
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.7
MPN: 1
ISBN: 1740599152
Dewey Decimal Number: 915.1046
EAN: 9781740599153
ASIN: 1740599152
Publication Date: May 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Best guide book for China November 9, 2007
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
I spent a month in China with this guide book. The city maps were not great, but they were the best maps I found in any guide book. When I got back from my trip, someone gave me a hilarious new novel that takes place in China -"Sweet and Sour July"- about a group of tourists making their way from Hong Kong to Beijing and seeing everything in between. I highly recommend both of these books if you are planning a trip to China.
 Use With Caution! November 8, 2007
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
It is confusing that many of the reviews here are for the National Geographic Traveler China book, by the same author as the Lonely Planet book. The National Geographic book has lots of pictures and is a good "idea" book. The Lonely Planet is geared to the independent traveler, with much more specific information about how to get around. This review is for the Lonely Planet.
My husband and I have successfully used Lonely Planet books on many other trips, but we were disappointed in the China book. Obviously China is a huge country, and it is changing very quickly, so we were not surprised to find that many places no longer exist and that some of the information was out-of-date. But we WERE surprised at the amount of blatantly wrong information. For example, the section on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain near Lijiang was so mixed-up that we ended up spending the day at the wrong hiking area.
In most countries it would be fairly easy to double-check the accuracy of a description by asking a hotel concierge or taxi driver. In China, though, we often had problems communicating, so we relied much more heavily on our guidebooks.
The book is huge, but it didn't need to be quite so big. Many of the descriptions are excessively wordy, and sometimes it seemed like the author was more interested in writing a clever review than clearly giving the facts.
The best thing about the book is that names of places and most streets are written in Chinese. It was incredibly helpful to be able to point to the place we wanted to go. We found that our accents and pronunciations were so bad when we tried to read pinyin that most people didn't even realize we were trying to speak Chinese to them.
We looked through other guidebooks at some of our guest houses, and unfortunately none seemed to be much better.
Fine, No Problem, What More Could You Want? October 25, 2007
11 out of 17 found this review helpful
I spent over over two months traveling around China and this is the book that I took with me. Besides the fact that the map at the front isn't very good and that in a couple of remote places (the North Korean border town of Dandong, for example) the street maps weren't entirely accurate (a problem in China given that local people usually don't even know the name of the street on which they work) I found this to be a great book. Really. It was fine. It did the trick. No problems. I subjected it to quite a lot of wear and tear and it's still togther and looking good. I cannot, for the life of me, understand some of the negative reviews here.
One says there's no Chinese in the book. I'm looking at the Chinese in the book right now. In addition to place names, food items, and so on and so forth, there's an entire section of it for pity's sake (although, to be fair, it has been cleverly disguised as "Languages"). Another critic claims that the volume doesn't contain any useful travel information, a kind of miracle when you consider that it's nearly a 1000 pages long and positively teeming with the sections 'Sights,' 'Sleeping,' 'Getting There and Away,' 'Getting Around,' 'To and from the airport,' 'Maps,' etc.
Despite the LP formula, quality can vary from writer to writer and book to book and some writers are bent on plugging the hum drum (lest the potential buyer think the country is rubbish and return the book to its spot on the shelf), but not in this case. Perhaps there are a few minor glitches here and there but in a tome of this size there are bound to be. Basically, you arrive at a place, check into a recommended hotel, take a look at the 'Sights' section and off you go. Book your onward ticket from your hotel's in-house travel agency, which is easy to find as it's usually the same counter or the one next to your hotel's in-house "massage center."
One more thing: if you are using this guide book in China, you may want to consider tearing out the map in the front. I ran into three people who had their Lonely Planets confiscated by officials because it didn't include Taiwan. Each person was given a little geography lesson before having their (rather expensive) book taken away from them ("Do you see this troublesome little island here? The one with more than a thousand missiles aimed at it? To whom does it belong?"). The reason why this can be problematic is that you rarely see English travel guides (even second hand ones) in China, except for major cities like Shanghai and Beijing. I ran into a nice Danish couple who had their Lonely Planet taken away and hence they had to waste valuable time searching around for a new one. It was their first time to China and they hadn't the faintest idea as to where or what Taiwan was. But, of course, they do now. No matter which book you decide on, enjoy your travels in China. It's certainly a fascinating place.
Troy Parfitt, author
 Some decent information, but often outdated or inaccurate. October 2, 2007
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book contains some decent travel information, but the relevance and accuracy of that information varies wildly from section to section, as this book was actually written by several authors at different times in the past. Some sections are rather strong, others contain blatant typos in the Chinese and pinyin, inaccurate maps or bad directions, and pointers to restaurants and markets that have long since closed. I have owned a previous edition of this book, and interestingly enough, while the authors of each section have changed, the content has not been updated, keeping inaccurate and outdated information from older versions. The authors often weave their political opinions and biases into the book, which I feel distracts from its primary objective of providing objective travel information. It is somewhat ironic that this book points fingers at the Chinese for supposedly diluting the local culture of Xinjiang and Tibet, but at the same time provides information for busloads of foreign tourists to come to these regions. As another reviewer mentioned, the Lonely Planet effect is quite noticeable and previously untouched spots are now swarming with backpackers and tourists.
The book gives decent hotel recommendations, but they are often slanted to backpacker type "digs" where there will be plenty of other foreigners around. It could be the Lonely Planet effect again, but it seems the hotel recommendations are for hotels that are substantially more expensive than nearby choices of similar quality.
There were one too many times when a map led me in the wrong direction or the Chinese name for a place was so completely mangled that nobody was able to figure out what it meant. An example is the Altun mosque in Yarkand, Xinjiang - not only did they write it "Altyn" in the book, but they wrote the Chinese as "a-qin-dian" which sounds absolutely nothing like the proper Chinese transliteration, "a-le-tun." The directions were also useless, along the lines of "go right from the bus station and get on a bus, then ride it for some time until you reach the mosque." As the bus station had been moved to a completely different part of town, the directions were useless. Plenty of other examples abound - another big one that comes to mind is the guidebook's frequent claim that certain towns don't have any hotels where foreigners can stay. This might have been true years ago, but we never had any problem finding accommodation.
It's also ironic that this guidebook laments the status of the Uyghur language in Xinjiang, but does not provide any Uyghur travel phrases, as it does for Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tibetan; instead, they simply suggest you to buy their Central Asia phrasebook. When I was traveling in Xinjiang, I found that many Uyghurs have a hard time communicating in Chinese, and it was difficult to talk with them without knowing some Uyghur(which I learned from Chinese books).
To sum it up, there's some decent travel information to be had, but the accuracy and relevance varies a lot, and many sections are poorly written. The maps are often inaccurate, and there are recommendations for hotels and restaurants that have closed years ago. I would not recommend this book to someone who has never been to China before, or does not speak the language.
Lonely Planet - CHINA August 25, 2007
4 out of 12 found this review helpful
Physical condition - Bent cover and first pages - ACCEPTABLE
Contents - We plan a trip to China in November 2007. This
Guide will be an invaluable resource - even though we will
be on a guided tour. We have guests that have lived years in
China and when they saw our copy of "Lonely Planet - CHINA",
they said that "It is absolutely THE BEST."
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