Where to stay in Shijiazhuang

Shijiazhuang is the capital and most populous city of China's Hebei Province, located 266 kilometres (165 mi) southwest of Beijing. It administers eight districts, three county-level cities and eleven counties, and is east of the Taihang Mountains, which extend over 400 km (250 mi) from north to south with an average elevation of 1,500 to 2,000 m (4,900 to 6,600 ft).

Shijiazhuang is a comparatively young city. It was an unimportant town until the Zhengding-Taiyuan and Beijing-Hankou railways were built, whereupon it became a regional transport hub. Captured by the People's Liberation Army under the leadership of the Communist Party in 1947, it was the cradle of the new China, and for three years housed the party headquarters. As of 2022, Shijiazhuang's prefecture boasted a population exceeding 11 million, with over 4 million residing in the central metropolitan area.

Getting around

Most tourist attractions are outside the city. Traffic is marginal, except at rush hour, at which point it could take as much as 20 minutes to get through certain intersections on many of the major roads (especially Ping'An Da Jie, Zhongshan Lu, Yuhua Lu, Jianshe Da Jie and Zhonghua Lu). Buses in Shijiazhuang, as in any large city in China, are frequent and cheap: just ¥1 for a journey, whatever the distance. But during the summer and winter some buses with air conditioning charge ¥2.

Wikivoyage contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0; excerpted.