10-Day China Family Itinerary: Beijing, Xi'an & Shanghai with Kids

A week in China works, but it works the way a weekend in New York works. You see the famous things, and you leave with a list of what you missed. The tenth day is where that changes. Three cities stop competing for your attention and start having room to breathe, and the trip becomes something your children talk about differently than they talk about a holiday.

The reason ten days suits this particular trio is geography. Xi'an sits almost exactly between Beijing and Shanghai, roughly 750 miles from each, so the route runs in a straight line rather than doubling back. Beijing to Xi'an is a five-and-a-half-hour train, and Xi'an to Shanghai is a two-and-a-half-hour flight. Two travel legs, both under six hours, and no city on the list is a detour from any other.

It is the right length for families whose children are around seven and up, and who want the Terracotta Warriors without cutting Shanghai short. Three days in Beijing, three in Xi'an, three in Shanghai, one day of slack. Every price, booking window, and opening time below was checked in September 2026.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Ten days covers three cities at a human pace. Three nights in each, with a travel leg on the morning of day four and day seven rather than a full day lost to each.

2. The two bookings that decide this trip have different clocks. Train seats release 15 days out at 08:00 Beijing time. Terracotta Warriors tickets release 7 days out and are gone within minutes in July and August. Both happen in the middle of the American night.

3. The Terracotta Warriors are the single hardest ticket on this route. Adult entry is about $18, under-16s are free but still reserved, a daily cap, and a 7 a.m. release window. The Shaanxi History Museum is free and harder still.

4. The Xi'an city wall is the best hour your children will spend in China. $8 to enter, $6.8 for a bike, 8.5 miles of flat brick above the traffic, and no age floor worth worrying about.

5. Budget roughly $9,180 to $17,000 all in for a family of four including flights, or about $500 to $900 a day on the ground. October and Chinese New Year sit at the top of that range.

Three cities means three sets of release clocks

Beijing–Xi'an train seats, warrior tickets, the free Shaanxi museum and the Forbidden City all open on separate schedules, most of them overnight. Give us your dates, and we will hold all four before you commit →

Table of Contents

I. Why 10 Days Works So Well

II. Your 10-Day Route

III. Family Trip Budget

IV. Trains, Flights & Transfers

V. Planning Tips for Families

VI. China Family Trip FAQs

I. Why Ten Days Gives This Route Room to Breathe

Beijing, Xi'an and Shanghai get called the Golden Triangle for a marketing reason as much as a geographic one, but the geography is real and it does the heavy lifting. Each city sits on a different chapter of Chinese history and each one is a full stop rather than a variation on the last. Beijing is imperial power, Xi'an is the ancient capital that came before it, and Shanghai is what the country built once the emperors were gone. Children absorb that sequence without being taught it, because the evidence is standing in front of them.

The pacing is where ten days earns its keep. A seven-day version of this route exists, and we run it, but it asks you to see the warriors and the Bund inside the same week and it leaves no room for the day everyone wakes up tired. Ten days gives you two travel legs of under six hours each, three nights in every city, and a spare half-day in Shanghai that exists purely so nothing has to be cancelled.

What each city asks of your family

Beijing is the physically demanding one. The Forbidden City is a mile of stone with almost no shade, and the Great Wall is a mountain with stairs on top of it. Two of the ten days here will end with everyone flat on a hotel bed, and that is the correct outcome.

Xi'an sits in the middle, and it is the surprise of the trip for most families. The warriors are in a hangar-sized building with seating, which is far gentler than the photographs suggest. The city wall puts your children on bicycles above a moat with a skyline behind it. The food is the most child-friendly in the country, because a city that invented the flatbread sandwich and hand-pulled noodles is not asking anyone to be brave.

Shanghai is the recovery stop. It is flat, walkable, laid out along a river, and happy to let you spend a morning doing nothing. Putting it last is deliberate. It is the city where a tired family can still have a good day, and by day seven that matters more than any single sight.

Who this route is not for

Families travelling with a child under four will find ten days of this hard going, and a shorter, single-city trip usually serves them better. Anyone determined to add Chengdu, Guilin or Hong Kong to this route is looking at fourteen days, not ten, and forcing it produces a week of packing and unpacking with three cities as scenery.

If the warriors are the one thing your family cannot leave without, this is the shortest honest route that includes them. If they are not, the seven-day Beijing and Shanghai version does the same trip with less travel and more rest.

Ten days is usually the first trip, not the only one. Most families who take this route come home with a second list: Chengdu for the pandas, Guilin for the river, Harbin for the ice. If that sounds familiar, we can sketch the follow-up while the first one is still fresh. Plan the next one →

II. Beijing to Xi'an to Shanghai: The Full 10-Day Plan

There are two ways to run these ten days. The first is to book it yourself: you take the seats on release day, hold the warrior slot, and move through three cities on the metro, the train and DiDi. The second hands the week to a private guide who meets you at arrivals, drives between the sites, and carries the bookings that open while you are asleep.

The day-by-day below is written for the self-guided version, because that is where the detail lives. A day-by-day comparison of the guided version follows it.

Day by Day

Day 1 · Land in Beijing and stay awake until dark

Flying east is the punishing direction. You leave the United States on a Tuesday morning and land in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon, having lost a night you do not get back. The families who enjoy day two are the ones who resisted the urge to do anything on day one.

Drop the bags, then walk somewhere flat and busy. Qianmen and the Dashilan lanes south of Tiananmen work well: wide, level, and lined with food stalls that will persuade a jet-lagged eight-year-old to eat something. Dinner at six, lights out by nine, even if nobody feels sleepy. The next two days run on this one.

Day 2 · Tiananmen, the Forbidden City and Jingshan

Enter the Forbidden City through the Meridian Gate and walk north. It is one straight line of about a mile, and you come out at the north gate facing Jingshan Park, where a fifteen-minute climb buys the view back across the golden roofs. Save the climb for the end of the palace rather than the start; it is the photograph everyone wants and a poor place to spend your first reserves of energy.

Booking rule: tickets are released seven days ahead at 20:00 Beijing time through the official WeChat mini-program, and in peak season they are gone within minutes. Children under 18 enter free but still need a zero-yuan reservation, and the palace closes on Mondays. Aim for a slot at 13:20 or later, which lets the morning tour groups clear out ahead of you.

The afternoon is for the Shichahai hutongs or Nanluoguxiang. This is the part children describe at home as much as the palace itself, because it is where the city turns into alleys, bicycles, and somebody selling candied fruit on a stick.

Book Peking duck for dinner. It is carved at the table, it arrives with pancakes and hoisin, and it is the easiest adventurous meal to sell to a hesitant eater in the whole country.

Day 3 · The Great Wall at Mutianyu

Two sections dominate the conversation. Badaling is closer, reachable by a 30-minute high-speed train from Beijing North, and absorbs several tens of thousands of visitors a day in peak weeks. Mutianyu is an hour and a half by road and handles roughly a third of that traffic, which is why it is the better call with children.

The standard family run at Mutianyu is the cable car up to Tower 14, a walk along the ridge for as long as everyone is still enjoying it, and the toboggan down. Buy the round-trip cable car at the gate; the path up from the base is steep and long and nobody thanks you for it.

Arrive for the 7:30 opening and the ridge belongs to you for an hour. There is very little shade up there, and by midday in summer the stone is radiating heat back at everyone.

Day 4 · Temple of Heaven, then the train west

Keep the morning light. The Temple of Heaven opens at 6:00 and costs $5 for the combined ticket that admits you to the Hall of Prayer, the Echo Wall, and the Circular Mound Altar. Children under 18 go free. Buy the combined ticket rather than the $2.3 park ticket, which gets you through the gate and stops there. The main halls open at 8:00 and close on Mondays.

Go early for the park rather than the buildings. The long corridor beside the east gate fills up with retirees playing cards, singing opera and practising calligraphy on the paving stones, and it is the most human hour you will spend in Beijing. The park is flat and shaded and has room for children to run, which is exactly what a travel morning needs.

Then the train. Beijing West to Xi'an North, five and a half hours on the fastest services, second class from $77 to $86. Xi'an North station is 20 minutes by metro from the Bell Tower area, so you are checking into a hotel in the old city by early evening.

Two mechanical details worth repeating. Your passport is your ticket, so there is nothing to print and no collection window. And the child fare is calculated on age rather than height: under 6 travels free without a seat of its own, 6 to 13 pays half the adult fare, and 14 and up pays full. Age is counted on the day you travel.

Be at Beijing West 45 minutes before departure. It is an enormous station and the gates close five minutes before the train leaves, without negotiation.

Day 5 · The Terracotta Warriors, then the city wall by bike

This is the day that justifies the length of the trip. The Terracotta Warriors sit 25 miles east of the city in Lintong, and the museum is three pits inside a building the size of an aircraft hangar. Pit One is the one from the photographs: roughly 6,000 figures in battle formation, in rows, all facing the same direction. Six thousand is a number children can hold in their heads in a way that "many" never is.

Adult tickets are $18 and include the Lishan Garden burial site a short shuttle ride away. Anyone under 16 and anyone over 65 enters free, but a reservation is still required for every traveller, and the daily cap sits at 65,000 people. Tickets release seven days ahead and the popular morning slots go quickly. Pits Two and Three are smaller and worth an hour between them; the bronze chariot hall on the way out is the part adults tend to remember. A licensed guide at the site costs $16.5 to $22.3 and is worth it here more than anywhere else on this route, because a wall of 6,000 figures is silent without someone to explain who they were.

Get there for opening at 8:30 and you will have Pit One almost to yourself for half an hour. The crowds arrive between 10:00 and 14:00, which is when school groups fill the viewing platforms.

Back in the city by mid-afternoon, the Xi'an city wall is the antidote to a day spent indoors. It is a complete 8.5-mile rectangle of Ming brick standing 40 feet above the traffic, wide enough to ride three abreast, and the entire loop is closed to cars. Entry is ¥54 for adults, free for children under 1.2 meters, and free for anyone over 65. Bicycle rental at the top is $6.7 for a single and $13.5 for a tandem, both for about three hours, with a refundable deposit. Start at the South Gate, which has the longest hours and the largest fleet of bikes.

Late afternoon is the best window. You ride in daylight, you watch the sun drop behind the Drum Tower, and by the time you hand the bikes back the gate towers are floodlit. The brick surface is uneven, so closed shoes rather than sandals.

Day 6 · Shaanxi museum, Muslim Quarter, flight to Shanghai

Start with the Shaanxi History Museum if you can get in. It is free, it holds 370,000 objects covering a million years, and it is the single hardest reservation on this itinerary. Tickets release five days ahead at 17:00 Beijing time through the museum's WeChat account, and each passport can hold only one booking. If the free slot does not come through, the ¥30 Treasures Gallery ticket is a paid route in that skips the queue entirely, and it is money well spent.

Around lunchtime, walk the Muslim Quarter behind the Drum Tower. This is Xi'an at its most enjoyable for children: hand-pulled noodles stretched in the street, lamb skewers, flatbread sandwiches, pomegranate juice, and a general tolerance for people who want to watch before they eat. The Great Mosque a few lanes in is a walled garden in the middle of the market and a good place to slow down.

Flights to Shanghai leave Xi'an Xianyang International in the evening, take about two hours and twenty minutes, and land at either Pudong or Hongqiao. Fares move a great deal: a discounted economy seat is routinely available between $45 and $67, while a walk-up full-fare seat is closer to $363. Book a week or more out and the difference pays for a night of the hotel.

Day 7 · Classic Shanghai in one loop

Start at Yu Garden and the old bazaar around it in the morning, while the light is soft and the lanes are still quiet. The classical garden itself is small and dense, with rockeries, koi ponds and zigzag bridges that hold a child's attention far longer than their size suggests. Around it sits a maze of souvenir streets you can either embrace or steer around.

Walk, or take one metro stop, to Nanjing Road and follow it to the river. The Bund at the far end is the postcard: a mile of colonial bank buildings on one side, the Pudong skyline on the other.

Time the Shanghai Tower for late afternoon. The observation deck on floor 118 sits at 1,791 feet inside a 2,073-foot building, and the elevator covers the climb in about 55 seconds, which is its own small attraction for anyone under twelve. Adults pay around $27, with discounts for children between 1 and 1.4 meters and free entry under one meter. Go up while it is light and stay until the city switches on.

Finish with a Huangpu River cruise, around $18 for an adult on the standard sailing. An hour on the water, both skylines lit, nobody on their feet. It is the easiest good ending in the city.

Day 8 · Disneyland, or the Shanghai your kids would not pick

Shanghai Disneyland prices by date across six tiers, from $71 to $119 for an adult, with child tickets set at 75 percent of the adult price on that same day. Children under three, or under 1.0 meters, enter free. Zootopia is the newest land and the one your children have probably already seen on somebody else's account.

The tier sets the price, not the seller, and that is the whole trick. A quiet Tuesday can cost a third of what a summer Saturday costs for an identical park. If your dates have any flex in them, move them. You can also leave and re-enter on the same ticket as often as you like, so an afternoon break at the hotel costs nothing extra.

If a full theme-park day is not what your family needs, the other branch still fills the day. The Shanghai Science and Technology Museum reopened in May 2026 after a three-year rebuild, with ten permanent halls and roughly eight in ten exhibits built to be touched, plus a gallery aimed at ages 3 to 8. Adult tickets run about $6.7. Pair it with the Ocean Aquarium in Lujiazui, which has a 155-meter underwater tunnel, costs around $24 for adults and $16.5 for children, and is free under one meter.

Day 9 · A rest day that is not quite a rest day

Day nine exists so that nothing has to be sacrificed to a bad night's sleep. Keep the morning free and let the family decide over breakfast. If everyone wakes up energetic, the Shanghai Tower slot you did not use on day seven can move here, or the Former French Concession makes an easy two-hour walk under the plane trees with coffee at the end of it.

If everyone wakes up flat, this is the day for a pool, a long lunch and an early night before the flight home. Families who build a slack day into the middle of a long trip consistently report finishing it in better shape than those who do not, and this is the day doing that work.

Day 10 · A slow morning, then home

Do not schedule anything you would be sad to miss. Xiaolongbao for breakfast, a last walk along the Bund, and then the airport. Pudong International is 45 to 60 minutes from downtown by car, and international check-in typically closes an hour before departure, so three hours at the airport is the safe number with children.

If you are flying out of Pudong and want one last piece of theatre, the Maglev covers the first stretch of the run in about eight minutes at up to 300 kilometers an hour.

The same ten days with a private guide

Same three cities, same order, and a different answer to the question of who carries the logistics. Here is what changes when it is guided rather than self-booked.

UME  Travel runs this as a tailor-made private tour rather than a fixed group departure, which is why the ten days above can be rearranged around your arrival time, your children's ages and how much walking everyone will tolerate. Three things come as standard: an English-speaking guide with a private car and driver in each city, hotels chosen for location and room size rather than for a brand list, and no shopping stops anywhere in the itinerary. Dietary requests are arranged in advance, including religious and medical ones, and flight seats are selected for legroom where the fare class allows it. International flights are not part of the tour price.

FAMILY PRIVATE TOUR

Classic China Family Tour (Can be customised)

10 days · Beijing – Xi'an – Guilin – Yangshuo – Shanghai · From US$3,799 per person, based on a 2-person private group.

This family-focused route combines China's classic highlights with more hands-on experiences for kids. See the Great Wall and Forbidden City in Beijing, discover the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, cruise the Li River through Guilin and Yangshuo, then finish in Shanghai. Private guides, private transfers, and flexible daily planning make the journey easier for families traveling across several cities. See the 10-day family route →

If you want the ten days as a packaged route

The closest ready-made version to this itinerary runs Shanghai, Suzhou, Xi'an and Beijing over nine days, which trades the Disney day for a water town and reverses the order so you finish in the capital. It is a good fit for families who would rather have a canal town than a theme park, and it can be extended by a day to bring it to ten.

Every figure above is a starting rate rather than a fixed price, quoted per person on a two-person private group, and each can be lengthened or shortened. The full spread of options sits on our China itinerary hub.

Looking for a ready-made family itinerary? These four private China tours cover different travel styles, from the classic Beijing–Xi'an–Shanghai route to Guilin and Yangshuo or a Yangtze River cruise. Each itinerary can also be customized around your family's travel dates, interests, and preferred pace.

III. What a Family of Four Should Budget

The table assumes two adults and two children aged 6 to 13, ten days on the ground with nine hotel nights, and an open-jaw routing that flies into Beijing and home from Shanghai. Domestic transport is separated from international flights because the two behave nothing alike.

The four numbers that move the total

Flights swing the most. The same four seats can run $4,200 or $6,600 depending on when you book and when you fly. Booking two to four months ahead and leaving on a Tuesday or Wednesday typically saves $100 to $300 per ticket against a weekend departure. July, August and the December holidays are the expensive windows.

The extra three nights are what separates this budget from the seven-day version, and they cost more than the airfare difference suggests. Three additional hotel nights plus three more days of food and tickets add roughly $1,300 to $2,200, which is why ten days is a real step up rather than a rounding error.

The Xi'an to Shanghai flight is the softest line in the table because fares on that route move by a factor of eight. The cheapest discounted seats sit near ¥300 and the walk-up full fare is $363. Booking with the rest of the trip rather than at the last minute is worth several hundred dollars on this leg alone.

Disneyland is the biggest optional line in the attractions budget. Two adults and two children on a mid-tier date run about $309; on a special peak date it is closer to $412; and you can remove it entirely by taking the museum branch on day eight. The morning is free either way, so the only real decision is which kind of day your children will remember.

Reading these numbers against a tour price

The table covers four people and includes international flights, which is what your family will actually spend. Tour prices are quoted the other way round: per person, without airfare. Our eight-day family route starts at US$3,199 per person on a two-person private group and covers the hotels listed on it plus a private guide and car in each city. International flights sit outside that figure, so add four tickets before setting the two side by side.

What the private version buys that a spreadsheet cannot show is mostly sleep and slack. Somebody else is awake at 08:00 Beijing time when the train seats release and at 17:00 when the free museum slots go, somebody else holds the warrior reservation and moves it if your flight slips, and on the ground there is a car at the end of a long walking day. Whether that is worth the difference depends on how much of the planning you want as your own project, and both answers are reasonable.

The budget question is really a timing question. Move this trip a week in either direction and the same ten days can cost a third less, with shorter queues at every stop. Send us your window and we will tell you which dates inside it are the cheap ones. Find your best-value dates →

IV. The Easiest Way to Travel Between Beijing, Xi'an & Shanghai

Two legs carry this itinerary and they are deliberately different. The Beijing to Xi'an leg stays on the ground because the train competes with flying on equal terms. The Xi'an to Shanghai leg flies because the rail distance is over 900 miles and no sensible family wants eight hours of it.

Why the train beats the plane to Xi'an

Beijing to Xi'an is about 750 miles, which is right at the distance where the two modes meet. The flight is two hours in the air and closer to five door to door once you add the airport runs, the security queue and the baggage wait. The train is five and a half hours from city centre to city centre, and on a Chinese high-speed service that time goes faster than it sounds: a power outlet at every seat, enough legroom for a tall adult, food trolleys, and a window full of the North China Plain turning into the Loess Plateau.

Child fares are age-based. Under 6 travels free without a seat, 6 to 13 pays half, and 14 and up pays full, counted on the travel date. Seats release exactly 15 days ahead at 08:00 Beijing time, and no agency can pull them earlier. Fares do not surge, so booking late costs you selection rather than money.

Why the flight beats the train to Shanghai

Xi'an to Shanghai is 1,220 kilometers by air and considerably more by rail, and the train takes six to seven and a half hours against two and a half in the air. This is the one leg where flying is the obvious answer, and the fares reward planning: discounted seats on the evening services commonly run $44.5 to $67, while the full walk-up fare is $363.

Book the early evening departure rather than the last one of the night. The 18:00 to 20:00 window gets you into a Shanghai hotel before ten with everyone still awake enough to eat something, and it leaves the whole of day six in Xi'an rather than in an airport.

Inside all three cities

The metro in Beijing, Xi'an and Shanghai is fast, cheap, bilingual and air-conditioned, at roughly 40 to 80 cents a ride. Xi'an is the easiest of the three, because the two lines families actually need are a cross through the old city and the Bell Tower sits on top of the intersection. Stations have English signage and machines with an English interface, and your passport gets you through any manual gate.

For anything the metro does not reach comfortably, use DiDi. The English version works with an international card, shows a fixed price before you confirm, and removes the need to explain an address in a language you do not speak. Drivers occasionally call to confirm the pickup point, which is the one moment the language gap shows; a message in the app usually settles it.

Two legs, four seats each, and one of them sells out on a fixed clock. Train seats open 15 days ahead at 08:00 Beijing time and the Xi'an to Shanghai evening flights fill first on Fridays and Sundays. We hold both as soon as your dates are firm, so you are choosing seats rather than taking what is left. Hold the seats for us →

V. What to Know Before Taking Kids to China

Book in this order, on these clocks

China's booking system runs on fixed release times, and on a three-city route you are tracking four of them at once. International flights first, as far ahead as you are comfortable. Hotels next. Then the ones with real deadlines.

Foreign passports work on all of these, but every system wants the passport number at the time of booking, for every traveller including children. Have all four numbers in front of you before you start, because the Shaanxi museum window in particular is measured in seconds rather than minutes.

Give the warriors their own morning

The single scheduling mistake families make on this route is treating the Terracotta Warriors as a half-day stop on the way to the airport. The museum is 25 miles outside the city, the site is large, and the three pits plus the bronze chariot hall take three to four hours without rushing. Give it a morning and pair it with the city wall in the afternoon, which is close enough to the old city that no travel time is lost.

Arrive for the 8:30 opening. The tour groups land between 10:00 and 14:00, and Pit One has a completely different feeling before they do.

Alternate hard days with easy ones

Across ten days the shape matters more than any individual stop. The heavy days are the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and Disneyland, and they should never sit next to each other. The itinerary above puts a train ride after the wall, a wall bike ride before a flight, and a flat city loop after the warriors. That rhythm is not an accident, and it is the part families most often get wrong when they build the trip themselves.

Xi'an is the easiest place to insert a slower afternoon, because the food is the attraction. Noodles, flatbread sandwiches, dumplings and skewers are all things a child will eat without negotiation, and the Muslim Quarter is walkable at whatever pace the group has left.

Beat the jet lag in the right direction

Flying east compresses your day, which is the harder adjustment. The two things that help most are getting outside into daylight on the afternoon you land and eating at local times from day one even when nobody is hungry. A nine o'clock bedtime on arrival night is worth more than any supplement.

By day four, when you board the train to Xi'an, the worst of it is behind you. That is another reason to put the train on day four rather than day two: it doubles as the first restful morning of the trip.

Eat early, eat simply

Book one proper dinner a day and keep the rest casual. Peking duck in Beijing, dumplings and hand-pulled noodles in Xi'an, and xiaolongbao in Shanghai are the three meals that reliably please every age at the table. Around them, noodle shops, hotel breakfasts and street stalls will carry you. Our guide to eating in China with kids has a printable card of Chinese phrases for "not spicy", "no chili" and "does this contain peanuts", which is worth keeping on a phone rather than in a bag.

Three cities means three times the logistics to hold in your head. Four reservation clocks, one train and one flight, plus apps to set up before you fly, and most of it happens while you are asleep. We run the bookings and send you a day-by-day sheet for the ground. Let us run the logistics →

VI. Frequently Asked Questions About a 10-Day China Family Trip

Q1: Is ten days enough for Beijing, Xi'an and Shanghai?

Ten days is the shortest length that does all three without cutting one of them short. Three nights in each city leaves two travel legs of under six hours and one spare day, which is what separates a comfortable trip from a rushed one. Seven days is enough for Beijing and Shanghai alone, and eight days can just fit Xi'an if you accept a tighter pace.

Q2: Do we need a visa, and does the 240-hour rule apply to us?

US passport holders are not on China's visa-free list, so a standard round trip needs an L visa at $140 per person, including children. The 240-hour visa-free transit does not cover a trip that starts and ends in the same country, so a Beijing-in, Shanghai-out, home-to-America routing still requires the visa. It does apply if you fly home through a third country or region, so a route like Beijing, Xi'an, Shanghai, Hong Kong, then the US qualifies and saves the whole visa cost. Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan count as separate regions for this purpose.

Q3: Are the Terracotta Warriors worth it for children?

They are the stop children talk about most, and the reaction is usually better than parents expect. Pit One holds roughly 6,000 figures in formation, which is a number a seven-year-old can grasp in a way that "ancient history" never is. The building is sheltered with seating at the viewing platforms, so it is far less tiring than the Forbidden City, and the main risk with younger children is boredom rather than difficulty.

Q4: How do we get Terracotta Warriors tickets?

Book on the official Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum WeChat account, where tickets are released seven days ahead and the daily cap is 65,000 visitors. Adult entry is ,$18 including the Lishan Garden site, while anyone under 16 and anyone over 65 enters free but still needs a reservation for every traveller. Morning slots go first, so the reliable approach is to have the booking page open before the release time rather than after.

Q5: Should we take the train or fly between the cities?

The train wins Beijing to Xi'an, and the flight wins Xi'an to Shanghai, and the split comes down to distance rather than preference. Five and a half hours on a high-speed train beats a two-hour flight plus airport time, while the six-to-seven-hour rail option to Shanghai does not. Either way the child fare is now based on age: under 6 free, 6 to 13 half price, 14 and up full.

When should we go?

May and September are the safest months for this route, with mild temperatures and manageable crowds in all three cities. April and October are close behind, though October should be planned after the 7th. Avoid the first week of October and Chinese New Year entirely, and expect real heat in Xi'an and Shanghai if you travel in July or August.

Still deciding whether ten days is the right length? Send us your rough dates and the ages of your children, and we will tell you honestly whether this route fits them or whether a shorter one would serve you better. Ask us your question →

• 7-Day China Family Itinerary — the shorter Beijing and Shanghai version

• Chengdu with Kids — pandas, Sichuan culture and family-friendly experiences

• Hong Kong with Kids — Victoria Harbour, family attractions and easy city adventures
  

Four separate bookings decide whether this trip works, and three of them open while America is asleep. If you would rather not set three alarms for a family holiday, that part is ours to carry. Tell us your dates and we will build the ten days around them →