Rating: 
Summary: Up to the usual Rough Guide stardard
Review: The Rough Guides are considered among the "cream of the crop" in the guidebook world, and this book is no exception. I used it extensively in the planning phase of my recent month-long trip to China, and it was very helpful.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.
Rating: 
Summary: Fine tuning of Rough Guide China, but a bit more needed
Review: The second edition of this outstanding guidebook has been produced by people who were rightly content in general terms with the style and content of the first. Twelve pages of colour photographs have been added - calculated more to increase sales than to be of use to the traveller on the road. Of the three sections, Part One, The Basics and Part Three, Contexts, are little changed. Between them, Part Two, The Guide, at 1005 pages is 76 pages longer. Regions which get an increase of twenty per cent or more are Dongbei, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hong Kong and Macau. A few new routes have been added, including the roads from Chengdu to Shaanxi and from Mangshi south-east along the Burma border. The book notes the opening of western Sichuan and north-western Yunnan, but unfortunately and oddly provides little information about these important regions. In fact there is very little mention of a vast tract stretching generally south from the Xining-Lhasa road, through Qinghai, the Tibetan "Autonomous" Region and western Sichuan to north-western Yunnan. Although that region warrants much more attention, it is inevitable that there will be some substantial regions that do receive little or no attention. All of north-eastern Sichuan/Chongqing, for example, is a blank. Perhaps it deserves to be; but a traveller is unlikely to find out unless he ventures there and explores for himself. This raises another unfortunate omission - any comprehensive account of which parts of China are still closed to foreign visitors without special permits. That matter is of little importance to travellers wishing to visit the "sights" listed in this guidebook, because few of those "sights" are in closed areas. That is, I expect, why the whole matter of what is closed amounts almost to a non-issue for the popular guidebooks. But it is certainly of importance to the traveller who, having reached this or that province with the help of a guidebook, wishes to go off to see what is in one of the blank areas. Comprehensive lists of what is closed are available, but hard to get, and available nowhere that I know of in English. Such a list, or better still a map of China showing the counties which are closed would be invaluable. That is exactly the kind of information that a guidebook of this kind should provide. The great majority of the changes in this edition are in the detail - admission prices, opening hours, accommodation addresses and prices. Whether the new information is accurate will have to wait for on-the-road testing. But the very large number of detailed changes suggests that the revision has been thorough. There is, of course, the usual and almost inevitable smattering of errors - Dehong described as an "Autonomous Region" (it is an autonomous prefecture) at page 810, Hubei abutting Sichuan (p503: it used to, but not since Chongqing was excised from Sichuan province in about 1997), the map on p773 showing part of Guanxi as incorporated in Guizhou province, Anhui not named on the map at p470, Macau omitted from the table of contents. An important error is the map on p898, showing the "Desert Highway" across the Taklamakan as joining the southern highway at Khotan, more than three hundred kilometres west of the actual junction, which is east of Minfeng (Niya). I would have liked to see more attention to the regional maps rather than the twelve pages of pictures. The maps are, on the whole for their given scope, reasonably well done, fitting in well with the text. Their scale bars are sometimes awry, and maps of adjoining regions are sometimes incompatible - most notably the map of the north-west, which does not fit with the other maps at any scale. So now I come to another special plea. Planning a trip through several regions calls for an overall map. In times gone by, fold-out or loose sheet maps were sometimes provided with guidebooks. Perhaps the practice was abandoned on the grounds of cost; it was not abandoned for lack of usefulness. Of course separate maps are available, but they are much less useful than a map would be if specially prepared for a particular guidebook - less useful because they include so many places not mentioned in the book, omit some that are, and in China may even use different names. After wrestling with adjustments to scales different from those indicated by scale bars I produced a single map of China from the regional maps in the new Rough Guide, and a most useful map it is for use in conjunction with the book. When next I travel to China, the new edition of the Rough Guide will be the one I shall take, supplemented where needed and possible by information from other sources. ()
Rating:
Summary: Fine tuning of Rough Guide China, but a bit more needed
Review: The second edition of this outstanding guidebook has been produced by people who were rightly content in general terms with the style and content of the first. Twelve pages of colour photographs have been added - calculated more to increase sales than to be of use to the traveller on the road. Of the three sections, Part One, The Basics and Part Three, Contexts, are little changed. Between them, Part Two, The Guide, at 1005 pages is 76 pages longer. Regions which get an increase of twenty per cent or more are Dongbei, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hong Kong and Macau. A few new routes have been added, including the roads from Chengdu to Shaanxi and from Mangshi south-east along the Burma border. The book notes the opening of western Sichuan and north-western Yunnan, but unfortunately and oddly provides little information about these important regions. In fact there is very little mention of a vast tract stretching generally south from the Xining-Lhasa road, through Qinghai, the Tibetan "Autonomous" Region and western Sichuan to north-western Yunnan. Although that region warrants much more attention, it is inevitable that there will be some substantial regions that do receive little or no attention. All of north-eastern Sichuan/Chongqing, for example, is a blank. Perhaps it deserves to be; but a traveller is unlikely to find out unless he ventures there and explores for himself. This raises another unfortunate omission - any comprehensive account of which parts of China are still closed to foreign visitors without special permits. That matter is of little importance to travellers wishing to visit the "sights" listed in this guidebook, because few of those "sights" are in closed areas. That is, I expect, why the whole matter of what is closed amounts almost to a non-issue for the popular guidebooks. But it is certainly of importance to the traveller who, having reached this or that province with the help of a guidebook, wishes to go off to see what is in one of the blank areas. Comprehensive lists of what is closed are available, but hard to get, and available nowhere that I know of in English. Such a list, or better still a map of China showing the counties which are closed would be invaluable. That is exactly the kind of information that a guidebook of this kind should provide. The great majority of the changes in this edition are in the detail - admission prices, opening hours, accommodation addresses and prices. Whether the new information is accurate will have to wait for on-the-road testing. But the very large number of detailed changes suggests that the revision has been thorough. There is, of course, the usual and almost inevitable smattering of errors - Dehong described as an "Autonomous Region" (it is an autonomous prefecture) at page 810, Hubei abutting Sichuan (p503: it used to, but not since Chongqing was excised from Sichuan province in about 1997), the map on p773 showing part of Guanxi as incorporated in Guizhou province, Anhui not named on the map at p470, Macau omitted from the table of contents. An important error is the map on p898, showing the "Desert Highway" across the Taklamakan as joining the southern highway at Khotan, more than three hundred kilometres west of the actual junction, which is east of Minfeng (Niya). I would have liked to see more attention to the regional maps rather than the twelve pages of pictures. The maps are, on the whole for their given scope, reasonably well done, fitting in well with the text. Their scale bars are sometimes awry, and maps of adjoining regions are sometimes incompatible - most notably the map of the north-west, which does not fit with the other maps at any scale. So now I come to another special plea. Planning a trip through several regions calls for an overall map. In times gone by, fold-out or loose sheet maps were sometimes provided with guidebooks. Perhaps the practice was abandoned on the grounds of cost; it was not abandoned for lack of usefulness. Of course separate maps are available, but they are much less useful than a map would be if specially prepared for a particular guidebook - less useful because they include so many places not mentioned in the book, omit some that are, and in China may even use different names. After wrestling with adjustments to scales different from those indicated by scale bars I produced a single map of China from the regional maps in the new Rough Guide, and a most useful map it is for use in conjunction with the book. When next I travel to China, the new edition of the Rough Guide will be the one I shall take, supplemented where needed and possible by information from other sources. ()
Rating: 
Summary: 2003 EDITION - VERY ROUGH INDEED
Review: This book presents itself as a revised edition, but it is very
little more than a prettied-up reprint of the text from three
years ago, and some of that was a bit long in the tooth then. The first and second editions carried great promise, worthy
competitors for the boys from LP. To represent the third as
having been "updated" is merely a deception. It would have been
better not done at all. The book is a curiosity. The title-page has it "written and
researched" by the same three authors as the previous edition
more than three years ago, but "this edition updated" by two
others. It's not clear that the original three have contributed
any "research" at all that was not reflected in the previous
edition. Nor is it even quite clear that the two "updaters"
have actually been on the ground in China. The "updating" is in
fact so slight that it could almost have been done by a
desk-bound clerk on the strength of readers' reports, with perhaps the odd nod in the direction of the Lonely Planet Thorn
Tree. The new edition has more pages, but that's explained by a
slightly larger type-face; finer paper; unchanged net weight.
A second colour introduced throughout, with improved visual
presentation, a bit prettier. And not many other changes. Chinese names and words still without tone-marks in the main
body of the text - a shortcoming that was never really excusable
and which has been merely unacceptable since Lonely Planet bit
that particular bullet. There is scarcely a town or locality mentioned that is not
included in the previous edition. No one who is on the ball in
the matter of China travel could fail to discover many more
places worthy of attention than he knew about three years
before. And circumstances change as well: more than a year
before the last edition, all of western Sichuan was opened for
the first time, but the vast treasure of the previously
forbidden region is still undiscovered by the new edition of
this (very) rough guide. The wonderfully scenic Muli and
Yanyuan counties in southern Sichuan have been open for years
but (apart from one passing reference to Yanyuan) rate no
mention. Yushu Prefecture in southern Qinghai, with all
counties open at least since mid-2001, is not mentioned; indeed
apart from Xining district and Golmud (Geermo) there's hardly a
mention of any part of Qinghai province at all. Of course I can't expect even the best guidebook to discover all
the places I may have discovered and found worthwhile - the
Mekong in north-west Yunnan, Yulin in northern Shaanxi,
Shibaoshan in western Yunnan, Daocheng and the Yading Reserve,
not to mention secret places in Tibet that I'd perhaps rather
keep to myself, nor the phenomenal valley of the Salween in
western Yunnan. The trouble is that this book has found very
few new places (though there's a tantalising addition of almost
impossibly remote Loulan and a couple of extra morsels on the
"southern Silk Road" - a reader's letter perhaps?) Then there are the occasions when I've found the previous
edition mistaken or misleading - Chishui, Matang, Tiger-Leaping
Gorge, Ruili district, Sanying hotel open to foreigners (well,
it is if you threaten the PSB with an international incident
failing their acquiescence), Pingliang hotel; and so on. Any
corrections? Not one that I can find. Some details of hotel tariffs, telephone numbers, admission
charges and so on have been changed, but they are generally far
too few to lend any confidence in the reliability of what has
not been changed; a number I've been able to check are just
wrong. The maps are now far too few, the provincial (or
multi-provincial) maps just too simplified; the largest scale
for some provinces is one to twenty million. Even so, how
revealing for the text to say that "Weixi marks the end of the
road" (from the east)! Tell that to the mini-bus drivers who
drive another 220km north to Deqin, from where the road
continues all the way to Lhasa and beyond! The railway line
between Changsha and north-western Hunan (which cut the journey
from Zhangjiajie to Changsha to about six hours when it had
already been commissioned three years ago) is not shown. Good points? There's a new "food and drink glossary", which is
to say phrase-list. The paper is excellent - strong and
light, perhaps better than the heavier paper of the Lonely
Planet, so that there are about 30% more pages but 10% less
overall weight. There must be more words in the Rough Guide,
but I doubt there is more information, regardless of its
accuracy.
Rating: 
Summary: As good as they come, but already way out of date...
Review: This is one of few guides to China whose authors seem to have a fair amount of understanding of, and interest in, the country they're writing on. This is reflected in a carefully crafted book with a lot of interesting footnotes that make it a good read as well as a travel companion. Something which reflects more the rapid growth of the PRC rather than the authors is the fact that even a mere 18 months after publishing, I found the guide to be accurate only about 50% of the time. You decide whether to shell out for it.
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