Methodology

Short answer: We publish booking facts (release times, prices, opening hours, passport rules) for foreign visitors to China. Each fact comes from the attraction’s own page or a government source where one exists, is dated, and — for the pages listed below — is compared with the official page by an automated weekly check (first baseline run on 11 Oct 2026). Travelers can tell us when something stopped working. We can be wrong; every key page says what we could and could not check.

1. Sources, in order of weight

1. Official pages of the attraction or operator (for example the Palace Museum’s English visit page or the National Museum of China’s reservation rules).
2. Government and embassy notices (Visit Beijing / Beijing government English pages, the National Immigration Administration, Chinese embassy notices for visa-free policy).
3. Our own booking-flow walkthroughs on official booking sites, dated, stopping before personal data or payment. Nothing is ever booked.
4. Booking channels such as Trip.com or Klook when that is the route foreigners actually use. We say which channel and when we saw it.
5. Traveler reports (forums, our own check-ins). They show where people get stuck. They are evidence that something may have changed, never a rule.

2. What “Last verified” means

It is the date we last compared the facts listed under What we re-checked on that page with the official source. It is not a guarantee that nothing has changed since. Where we could not check something automatically — a booking portal that only works as a JavaScript app, an official site that blocks automated access — the page says so under What we could not check automatically.

3. The weekly watch

A script reads 17 official pages every week, reduces them to visible text, hashes the relevant part and compares it with last week’s copy. It also pulls out specific facts (prices, hours, release times, policy end dates) and compares them with what our pages say. A change or mismatch is flagged for a human to review; nothing is published automatically. The registry of watched pages is part of our site repository.

Limits: 12 of our 17 key pages have facts that are compared automatically. Some official sites cannot be read by an automated check (Huangshan, the Terracotta Army museum and the Zhangjiajie park site blocked or timed out in our tests), and booking portals built as JavaScript apps cannot be diffed. For those pages we rely on dated manual checks and traveler reports, and we say so.

4. Traveler check-ins (no login)

Each key page asks “Did this still work for you?” with Yes and No — something changed. After a No you can say which step got you stuck and add a short comment.

• Anonymous: no account, no cookies. We store the vote, an optional step and comment, the page, a language code, country and device type — never an IP address. A visitor identifier is hashed together with the day, so it cannot be linked across days.
• One report per page per visitor per 24 hours (checked on the server and in your browser). Rate limits, a hidden honeypot field, length caps and HTML stripping reduce spam; comments containing links, email addresses or phone numbers are discarded; known bots are ignored.
• What the status chip means: with fewer than 3 reports in 30 days we say so (or “Be the first to confirm” if there are none). From 3 reports, recent ones count more (half-life 14 days). “Confirmed working by N travelers” appears when fewer than 30% of the weighted reports say something changed. “Mixed reports” appears from 30%. “Recently changed? Double-check the official source” appears when the last 7 days have at least 3 reports, at least 40% say something changed, and that is at least 25 percentage points worse than the 23 days before.
• Raw data is always one tap away: counts per week, common sticking points and recent comments.
• Crowd reports never overrule an official source. A “recently changed?” flag triggers a re-check, and the result is written to the page’s update log.

5. How often, and how to report an error

The watch runs weekly; key pages are re-verified when it flags a change or travelers report a problem, and each page keeps a dated update log. If you spot something wrong or outdated, use the Report an error box at the bottom of any key page, message us on WhatsApp (replies 9:00–24:00 Beijing time) or use the contact page. Please include the page and what changed.

6. Independence and limits

We are an independent guide, not affiliated with any attraction, museum or government body. We do not sell tickets. Some links are affiliate links (see the disclosure); they never decide which booking path we recommend. Visa pages are planning checklists, not immigration advice.

7. Key pages and what is checked automatically

Our older, shorter description is on How we verify; the history of changes is on Site updates.