China: The Rough Guide (Rough Guide to China) [Paperback]

Case in point #1: the guide has the Zhengzhou airport 3 km from the town center. Not so -- it's a 40-minute airport bus ride away. Had I not been to Zhengzhou before and known the correct distance, I would have missed my plane because I wouldn't have left for the airport in time.

#2: In Beijing, it lists the China National Art Museum (it uses Gallery, but it's Museum now) as one place where you can catch the airport bus to Capital Airport. The airport bus stop is actually a block away in a little hole-in-the-wall office with NO signs in English to identify it. Unless you are able to speak Chinese, forget about leaving from here because you'll never find the place.

#3: The translations they give for some phrases, while possibly not incorrect, are not ones used by the average Chinese person. In fact, my Chinese friends laughed at their translations.

#4: Wrong price information. While no one expects a guidebook to have the most current prices, they should be somewhere in the ballpark for newly published guides. This guide only came out this year, but prices, especially those at attractions, were as much as three times what Rough said they were.

#5: I never did find some of the places listed in the guide that I wanted to visit. The maps aren't that great, and it fails to give street addresses for some sites (maybe all of them -- I only looked for ones in the cities I just visited). An example, it said in Zhengzhou there are old (now closed) and new provincial museums. It said taxi drivers may take you to the old, but does not give an address for the new museum so you can have the driver take you there to begin with.

#6: Their hotel recommendations aren't that great. I stayed in two of them; one which is described as clean and cozy was in fact filthy, and I found I preferred to use public toilets in the street rather than the one in my hotel room.

And I don't even want to get into the mistakes about Beijing, where I lived for two years.

All in all, I was very disappointed in this guide. It may be OK for someone who's never been to China and wouldn't recognize the mistakes, but for someone who has lived and/or traveled widely in China, as I have, it's pretty worthless. I would have been better off taking my six-year-old Lonely Planet back with me. The information it contains could be no worse than what's in this Rough Guide.

"China: The Rough Guide" is designed for those that have more than a week or two in China. It is NOT a pocket guide (almost 2 lbs.) and more than 1100 pages. In this tome, Leffman, Lewis & Atiyah captures the best of China and give you the low down on what you must see while in China

Straight off the introduction in this guide is one of the most engaging I have ever read, "China is not so much another country as another world; chopsticks, tea, slippers, massed bicycles, shadow boxing, exotic pop music, karakoe, teeming crowds, Dickensian train stations . . . one of the world's largest economies." The maps (a critical element in any guide) are among the best found in a guide to date. Each restaurant and accommodation that is listed in the guide is marked on the maps (ya gotta love it).

The terse 3000-year history is as well written as objective as history can be, and thorough enough for most visitors. There is an outstanding appendix section, titled: "Context," covering, besides history, architecture, art, film, music and an excellent book list. The recommendations for accommodations and restaurants are reliable and up to date.

However, this is not a perfect guide (5 stars). One of the weak areas of the guide is the omission of an accommodation or a restaurant index. Thus, if you have a recommended restaurant you want to look up, you have to go through all the restaurant pages 'til you stumble across the name you seek or miss seeing it completely.

Another significant shortcoming is the lack of website and email addresses for hotels. Phone and fax numbers are provided but, considering the cost, nothing beats email. This is a significant omission, especially considering that the guide has a 2000 publishing date and most major Chinese hotels are now Internet connected,

Though the 'Basic Section' is up to guide books' standards, and has a few interesting sections (i.e., recommended tours, China Online Etc.) I found some of the information needed updating. Northwest Airlines is NOT the only airline that flies non-stop from mainland US to China, United Airlines also does (though the service is sub-par and the seats very cramped, I would not-recommended you flying UAL). Also, there is NO website information for any of the airlines.

I am disappointed that the 'boxed' vignettes are few and far between in this guide. There is no mention of Falun Gong and only a scant mention of the Three River Gorge Dam. Usually Rough Guides are much better in this area.

Finally, an ongoing peeve that I have about Rough Guides, is the use of a number system to quote the price range of a hotel, i.e., the `Friendship Hotel' is listed to cost a '6'. For a `6' you have to flip back to the numeric legion where you find out that `6' = 600 to 800 yuans, which you then divide by the current rate of exchange. As other guides simply demonstrate, there are better ways to help your reader gage approximate cost.

If you are going to just be in and around Beijing or Shanghai then this guide at 1100 pages may be an over kill. You would be better off with Rough Guide: Beijing, Cadogan's Beijing or Lonely Planet Shanghai (all highly recommended guides, see my reviews). However if you are going to explore this great country then 'China: The Rough Guide' will be a welcome companion. Recommended

The background sections of the book are outstanding, giving the reader a solid overview of Chinese history and culture. The primary sites of interest to travelers are adequately covered as well, and so the book is very helpful in planning one's itinerary.

The main drawback of the volume is it's weight. If you are backpacking in China, as I was, this book is pretty heavy to be lugging around. Therefore, unless you are staying in China more than a couple of weeks, you might consider looking at the smaller city guides.....or ripping the necessary sections out of this book and packing only those in your rucksack.

Highly recommended for pre-trip planning at home. Recommended for packing and taking to China *if* you are going on an extended trip to the country.