DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Beijing and Shanghai
These two fascinating cities reflect different aspects of China—Beijing is the traditional capital, the seat of political power and home to the ancient monuments of Imperial China; Shanghai is both a financial powerhouse and a city at the cutting edge of fashion with an interesting modern history. This DK Eyewitness Travel Guide provides in-depth coverage of these cities, including Beijing’s Great Wall and Forbidden City, Shanghai’s Bund and the French Concession, as well as the water towns of
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R Clarke "Rob"
Simply the best. Essential for the Beijing and/or Shanghai visitor.,
Whether you are heading to Shanghai, Beijing or both, this is your essential guide. It shows you in full color almost every sight to be seen, and has handly to-scale maps to get you around these bilingual cities. Having spent almost over a year’s time in Shanghai and environs, along with Beijing, during the past five years, this is always the book I take along. No question about it, look no further.
The book also features highly recommended walking tours in the cities to get off the well-worn tourist trail and see some of the “real” cities, rather than just the tourist-town areas. As usual for DK Eyewitness Guides, this is best as a sightseeing planning and then handy tour guide to take along. Your search for hotels and restaurants are best done on the internet to get up-to-date reviews. Hotel conditions can change dramatically and restaurants close their doors all the time, so the more timely the reviews of the trip food and lodging, the better. I use TripAdvisor and the NY Times on line as sources for these places.
Only fault is that more locations and sites need to be written out in Chinese characters to show them to taxi drivers, none of whom understand or read English, or any western language for that matter. You can get your hotel front desk to make out “taxi cards” for you as a substitute to show the drivers. Other guides do feature more Chinese to help the tourist get around. Also bear in mind that the subways change so rapidly in both cities, you are best served using <…> and <…>. While the maps were accurate when printed, these editions tend to last several years.
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|Anthony A. Rusinak
Very Informative,
I purchased this guide because there was not a “Top 10” guide by DK Eyewitness Travel for Shanghai that I could find. It was well written, full of colorful pictures, and very informative.
It’s size made it somewhat of a hassle to carry around on daily excursions (as opposed to the “Top 10 Beijing” guide I purchased) but it did the job and helped out with where to go and what I was looking at.
As I wrote in the review for the “Top 10 Beijing” guide, Mandarin translations that you could simply point to in the book to communicate where you want to go to taxi drivers, etc. would have been IMMENSLY helpful and this book lacks any of those.
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|Anonymous
Good book for traveling,
Bought this book and had it with me most of the time for my trip. It was interesting to read through before hand and you have something to reference after a trip. I went so many places that I enjoy going back to the book and learning more about some of the places we went. It also has good suggestion and warnings and there is a description of how to pronounce certain letters and words which was helpful from time to time.
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