Japan or China: which suits a culture-first traveller?

Japan is a country you read closely. China is a country you travel across.

That is the difference in a sentence, and most people who ask us this question are really asking which kind of trip they want rather than which country is better.

In short

• Japan — fourteen days (or twelve, or twenty), a maximum of 12 travellers, no internal flights, everything by rail and road
• China — twenty days, a maximum of 14 travellers, two internal flights, and far greater distances
• Japan is denser and more detailed; China is bigger and more varied
• Japan is the easier country to travel; China is the more astonishing in scale
• Both are land-only, so you book your own international flights

Japan, fourteen days. Fukuoka, Hiroshima and Miyajima, the Buddhist monks at Nara, a night with a host family in the countryside, four days based in Kyoto — temples, a cooking class, the bamboo forest and Fushimi Inari — then Takayama in the Japanese Alps, Mount Fuji, and Tokyo.

China, twenty days. Beijing and the Great Wall, the imperial city of Xi'an, then the Yangtze — the great river and its gorges by boat — Chongqing, and on into Yunnan: Lijiang, the Buddha grottoes at Shibao Mountain and Erhai Lake, the Stone Forest, a bamboo raft on the Yulong River, the rice terraces, and finally Shanghai and a water village.

The shapes are quite different. Japan gives you a small country in detail. China gives you a subcontinent in outline — and even in twenty days it is an outline.

Japan is the easiest long-haul country we sell. Trains are punctual to the second, everything works, cities are safe at any hour, and your luggage is forwarded ahead by courier on the days that matter, so you travel with a day bag. There are no internal flights. The demands are stairs, walking and heat in summer — set out in how much walking is there on a Japan tour.

China asks more of you. Twenty days is a long trip, the distances are continental, and there are two internal flights — Chongqing to Lijiang and Guilin to Shanghai — plus the Yangtze by boat. The rewards are proportionate: there is nothing in Japan on the scale of the Yangtze gorges or the Yunnan rice terraces.

Group sizes differ: a maximum of 12 in Japan, 14 in China.

Cost. Japan is the more expensive country day to day — food, transport and hotels all cost more than in China. China's trip is longer, which changes the comparison. We do not print prices here because they change; both trip pages carry the current figure, and what a Japan tour costs explains what sits behind ours.

Visas. Japan requires no visa for British passport holders on a tourist visit. China's position has been changing, and our twenty-day tour plus your own travel can exceed the visa-free window — see China's visa-free entry and what it changes, and check the current rules on GOV.UK rather than on any tour operator's website, ours included.

Language. English gets you further in Japan's cities than in inland China, though in both countries a guide is the difference between seeing a place and understanding it.

Japan, for most people — and that is not a hedge. It is easier, shorter, and the cultural detail is more accessible on a first visit. If you have limited long-haul experience or a fortnight rather than three weeks, Japan is the answer.

China, if you have travelled a good deal, want scale rather than intricacy, and have three weeks. The Yangtze and Yunnan sections in particular are the kind of thing people plan a trip around.

A genuine third answer: do Japan first and China later. They are not competing for the same slot — one is a fortnight and one is the best part of a month, and they leave quite different impressions.

If Japan is the one you have already done, where to travel if you loved Japan sets out the options, China among them.

If you have a fortnight: Japan. Three weeks is the minimum that makes our China route work, and a compressed version of China is a poor imitation of it.

If you have three weeks and have travelled widely: China, and go for the Yunnan half as much as for Beijing and Xi'an — it is the part people talk about afterwards and the part most itineraries skip.

If you are undecided: look at the calendar. Our Japan departures cluster in spring and autumn, which is when the country is at its best; China's run from spring through to autumn. The month you can travel may settle it more cleanly than any argument on this page.

Before you book either, our guides to how much walking there is on a Japan tour and three weeks in China set out what each one asks of you day to day.

Both are land-only, so you choose your own international flights, and every departure is guaranteed — it goes ahead regardless of how many others have booked.