Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Beijing (City Travel Guide)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The standard tourist destinations are well described. The hutong hotel I stayed in was good and I found it through this guide. There isn't much off the beaten track advice.

What is really bad in this book is the restaurant and bar advice. It is a typical white man's view of eating in restaurants. Several Western restaurants listed. That could be forgiven because some people don't like Chinese food. But the Choice of Chinese restaurants is just awful. None of the great places with regional food found in modern shopping centres are described. This is how many locals eat. Also missing are the great restarants in the office buildings for the different regions of China. They often have a great regional cuisine restaurant closeby, e.g. Sichuan. Instead we get Chinese restaurants that try to replicate the cosiness of a quaint small European restaurant or some big Chinese places were business people go and order dishes with expensive ingredients. These places do not provide much value add for most tourists.

The choice of bars is really odd. Several of them seems to have western owners and I'm sure they're in the book because of friendships with the owners. I visited a couple of places on a Wednesday and they were empty. So much for hipness! The description of other places like Susie Wong's as a hangout for prostitures is slighty ridiculous. When I went there they were giving out free salsa lessions.

Sadly I don't think there is a better book. My advice is to go to the websites .

This is one of the Lonely Planet `Best of' series: slim pocket-size soft-cover city guides typically containing around 100 pages. They are full-colour publications and print quality is good.

The inside front cover folds out to reveal a street map of `Greater Beijing' with place-names, districts and parks marked both in English and in Chinese characters. The inside of the back cover similarly folds out as a plan of the central area, with the Forbidden City dead centre.

The book divides into colour-coded sections:

* Introducing Beijing, its neighbourhoods and suggested visitor itineraries

* Highlights

* Sights and activities

* Trips and tours

* Shopping

* Eating

* Entertainment

* Sleeping

* About Beijing (history, environment, government, economy)

* Directory

* Index

Every page is illustrated with colour photography. Mini-articles are often inserted into the main text in coloured text-boxes - for example articles on China's one-child policy or the delicate art of cooking Beijing duck. The layout is user-friendly and the information generally accurate and useful.

One reservation would be that the guide's information about restaurants is not very useful for the budget traveller. You can find great food almost everywhere in Beijing in street-side noodle shops or in the shopping malls; you'll lose count of all the Beijing Duck-themed restaurants in the central area, and we never found a bad one. Also Beijing is a city packed with culture and history, and a further down-side to this pocket guide might be that due to its brevity it is a little short on detail for the visitor interested in the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs or the Great Wall: such a visitor might be advised to seek out a larger guide, or one more focussed on his/her specialist interests. Also, you'll need a larger-scale map to find your way around street-by-street, as the scale of those in the guide is too small.

However for most casual visitors who have only a few days in Beijing, the LP "Best of" guide is OK.

I normally like Lonely Planet books. But this one is plain awful.

The biggest failing is that it has no information -- at least that I could find -- on the Great Wall sites near the city. There is a long section on a place called Shanhaiguan where the Wall meets the sea, but it's about 300 km from Beijing. I guess there are a few places closer to Beijing where you can see the wall but the author decided that it wouldn't be helpful to discuss the places where tourists might actually go.

The book is poorly laid out, and the Chinese characters and accented English transliterations may work in a physical book. But on the Kindle, they don't work at all -- they break up the page but what's worse, they are hard to read.

Here's a more general complaint about Lonely Planet guides on Kindle -- the maps. They are hard to read, hard to navigate around and even in zoom view, they don't work.

Having bought this guide, I am now going to go out and get the Frommers guide or another guide to Beijing so I can more usefully plan my trip. Too bad though that I had to waste the money and my time going through this one.

I am quite a comfortable traveler and have been to several destinations and loved this book as an accompaniment in my Beijing journeys. It is not a book that will bring you off the beaten track in an adventurous sense (I guess) but I was able to find good accommodation, orient myself around the city, and get off to some wonderful "non-touristy" Great Wall hikes.

The book served me well and if you are heading to Beijing for the first time and want a concise valuable guide this is it. I found great accommodation for example for dollars a night and this paid for the book itself had I gone to a more expensive hotel - just in the first evening. Also a great guide to Peaking Duck at "5 star" restaurants for very reasonable fees.

I see that others feel the guide is not perfect, and I agree, but I have never come across a "perfect" guide book. I did enjoy having the book and found that it gave great advice and paid for itself many times over.

Concise, packed with first hand information, and easy to use. Indispensable for traveling abroad to a country very different from ours.

A very helpful book to use as we travelled on our own (not on tour) through Beijing! Good recommendations of places to visit, what to see, where to eat. Good details about shopping wisely in the markets there. It would be great to see a more updated version of the book for this location.

The maps are totally useless - the street lines are fuzzy and the writing is not legible in English or in Chinese.

This book is really small, about the size and thickness of a pocket-book. It falls short of detail and gives a very short description. The main historical highlights just get one paragraph each, and very few facts are mentioned. There are two paragraphs on the entire Forbidden City: too short to be any help.

You'd be much better off buying the standard Lonely Planet Beijing guide. Even the China Lonely Planet has a better Beijing section than this entire book.

I bought it, and returned it.