Splendid China Shanghai to Chongqing Yangtze River Cruise | 14-Day Upstream Tour

Shore excursions

• Shanghai Highlights: The Bund, Nanjing Road & Silk Workshop✓INCLUDED

  Start with Shanghai’s best-known view. The Bund is a riverside promenade lined with grand early-20th-century banks and trading houses, which look across the Huangpu River at the towers of Pudong. Stroll along the waterfront and take photos, then head to Nanjing Road, one of the busiest shopping streets in Asia, for neon, flagship stores and old-fashioned food shops. The morning ends at a traditional silk workshop. There you’ll see how silkworm cocoons are softened, unwound and stretched into silk, a craft China has practiced for thousands of years, and you’ll have time to browse silk garments and duvets.

• Lujiazui Financial District✓INCLUDED

  Cross the river from old Shanghai into the new. In just a few decades Lujiazui, in Pudong, went from farmland and warehouses to one of the most striking skylines in the world. Your guide shows you the district’s landmarks: the pink-globed Oriental Pearl Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and the twisting Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China. Looking back across the water at the Bund, you’ll see Shanghai’s past and present side by side.

Shore excursions

• Shanghai Museum✓INCLUDED

  The Shanghai Museum on People’s Square is one of the finest museums of classical Chinese art in the country. Its building is modeled on an ancient bronze cooking vessel. Inside, the galleries trace China’s artistic history through ritual bronzes thousands of years old, delicate ceramics, jade, calligraphy, landscape painting, coins and furniture. It’s a good introduction to the culture you’ll meet all along the Yangtze, and a calm way to spend the morning before you board your ship that afternoon.

Shore excursions

• Slender West Lake✓INCLUDED

  Slender West Lake is part of the Grand Canal UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its long, narrow waterway winds past willows, pavilions and arched bridges in the refined garden style that made Yangzhou famous. Emperors once came here on their tours of the south. Today you can follow their route along shaded paths to sights like the five-roofed Five Pavilion Bridge and the White Pagoda. The scenery shifts at every bend, which is why this is one of the most photographed gardens in China.

   

• Dongguan Street Historic Quarter✓INCLUDED

  Dongguan Street ran down to the old Grand Canal docks and was Yangzhou’s busiest commercial lane for centuries. Its Ming- and Qing-era storefronts, merchant homes and lanes have been carefully preserved. Wander past traditional shops selling lacquerware, jade carvings and handmade combs, and try local snacks such as Yangzhou’s famous steamed buns. It’s a lively, walkable look at everyday life in one of China’s great canal cities.

Shore excursions

• Niushou Mountain Cultural Park✓INCLUDED

  Niushou (Ox Head) Mountain has been a center of Buddhism in southern China for well over a thousand years. Today it is home to one of the most ambitious Buddhist complexes built in modern times. The centerpiece, the Usnisa Palace, is a vast hall built partly underground and filled with gold, mosaics and lotus motifs. It was created to house a sacred relic of the Buddha. Above it, the restored Tang-style Hongjue Temple pagoda overlooks forested hills.

• Muyan Riverside Scenic Area✓INCLUDED

  In the afternoon, follow Nanjing’s Yangtze shoreline through the Muyan Riverside Scenic Area, a green belt that runs from Mufu Mountain to Swallow Rock. Swallow Rock is a cliff jutting out over the river, said to look like a swallow about to take flight, and it has drawn poets and emperors for centuries. Walk the riverside paths, look out over the wide Yangtze you’ll be sailing up for the rest of the trip, and enjoy a quieter side of this former imperial capital.

Shore excursions

• Mt. Jiuhua✓INCLUDED

  Mt. Jiuhua is one of China’s Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains. It is dedicated to Ksitigarbha (Dizang), the bodhisattva who vowed to help every soul. Its 99 peaks are dotted with temples, monasteries and pilgrim paths, many of them still active, and the air carries incense and the sound of chanting. Explore the mountain village of Jiuhuajie and visit some of its most revered halls, including the shrine to a Tang-dynasty monk believed to have been Dizang reborn. You’ll see the mountain through the eyes of the pilgrims who still make the journey today.

• Jindizang Temple✓INCLUDED

  This temple honors Jin Dizang, the Korean prince-turned-monk who came to Mt. Jiuhua in the Tang dynasty. After his death he was revered as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Ksitigarbha. Its halls hold Buddhist statues, ritual objects and traditional temple architecture. It’s a shorter, gentler alternative to the full mountain day that still gives you a meaningful look at the region’s deep Buddhist heritage.

Shore excursions

• Jingdezhen Porcelain Town✓INCLUDED

  For more than a thousand years, Jingdezhen has been the porcelain capital of China. Its imperial kilns made the famous blue-and-white wares for Ming and Qing emperors, and pieces from them now sit in museums worldwide. Visit historic kiln sites and workshops where artisans still shape, paint and fire porcelain by hand, and follow a piece from raw clay to finished vessel. There’s time to shop for porcelain straight from the town that made it famous.

• Mt. Lushan Full-Day Excursion✓INCLUDED

  Mt. Lushan is a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape known for its mist-wrapped peaks, waterfalls and forests, which have inspired Chinese poets and painters for centuries. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries it also became a cool summer retreat for foreign missionaries and China’s political elite. More than 600 historic stone villas survive in the hilltop town of Guling. Ride up into the mountains for sweeping views, scenic walks and a visit to the villas, including Meilu Villa, once the summer home of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling.

Shore excursions

• Yellow Crane Tower✓INCLUDED

  Yellow Crane Tower is one of the Four Great Towers of China. It stands on Snake Hill above the Yangtze, a spot that has held a tower for some 1,800 years. Legends of an immortal flying away on a yellow crane, and the Tang-dynasty poems they inspired, made it one of the most celebrated landmarks in Chinese literature. Climb the five-story tower, with its sweeping yellow-tiled eaves, for panoramic views over Wuhan, the river and the great Yangtze bridges.

• Hubei Provincial Museum✓INCLUDED

  The Hubei Provincial Museum holds some of China’s most important archaeological treasures. The star is the 2,400-year-old set of bronze chime bells found in the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng. It’s a complete, still-playable orchestra of more than 60 bells, and the museum often holds short concerts on replica instruments. Another highlight is the Sword of Goujian, a bronze blade that has stayed remarkably sharp and untarnished for more than two thousand years.

Shore excursions

• Yueyang Tower & Dongting Lake✓INCLUDED

  Yueyang Tower is one of the Three Great Towers of South China. This elegant wooden tower has looked out over Dongting Lake, one of China’s largest freshwater lakes, for centuries. It became famous through an 11th-century essay by Fan Zhongyan, whose call to put others’ concerns before your own is still memorized by Chinese schoolchildren. Explore the tower and its gardens, and take in the wide views over the lake where it meets the Yangtze.

Shore excursions

• Xiongjia National Archaeological Site Park✓INCLUDED

  Jingzhou was the heartland of the ancient state of Chu, and Xiongjia is one of its most remarkable discoveries: a royal tomb complex from the Warring States period, about 2,400 years ago. Here you’ll see one of the largest chariot-and-horse burial pits ever found in China. Rows of chariots and horses were laid out to serve a Chu ruler in the afterlife. Guides explain what the excavations reveal about the wealth, warfare and rituals of one of early China’s great powers.

• Jingzhou Museum & Ancient City Wall✓INCLUDED

  Jingzhou Museum is known for its Chu and Han-dynasty finds, including fine silks, lacquerware, bronzes and a remarkably preserved 2,000-year-old body from a Western Han tomb. Afterwards, walk part of the Jingzhou Ancient City Wall, one of the best-preserved city walls in southern China. Its brick ramparts, gates and moat still circle the old town, much as they did in the days of the Three Kingdoms heroes linked to the city.

Shore excursions

• Three Gorges Dam & Ship Locks✓INCLUDED

  The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest hydropower project, and on this day you’ll experience it from two angles. In the morning your ship climbs the five-step ship locks, a slow, fascinating passage between towering concrete walls as the water rises chamber by chamber. In the afternoon a guided coach tour takes you to the dam’s viewing areas, including Tanziling, the highest viewpoint over the site. Your guide explains how the dam was built, why it matters for flood control and power, and how it reshaped life along the river.

Shore excursions

• Scenic Cruising: The Three Gorges✓INCLUDED

  This is the day the Yangtze is famous for. Your ship sails through the Three Gorges, where sheer limestone cliffs rise from the water, mist drifts across the peaks, and ancient plank roads and hanging coffins can sometimes be spotted on the rock faces. Each gorge has its own character: the long, winding Xiling, the quiet and graceful Wu with its twelve legendary peaks, and Qutang, the shortest but most dramatic of all. Find a spot on deck and watch the scenery go by.

• White Emperor City✓INCLUDED

  White Emperor City sits on a hilltop at the mouth of Qutang Gorge and looks straight down into Kuimen, the gorge’s dramatic gateway. Kuimen appears on China’s 10-yuan banknote. This is where Liu Bei, the ruler of the Shu kingdom in the Three Kingdoms period, entrusted his son and his kingdom to the strategist Zhuge Liang. The site is also linked to Li Bai and Du Fu, whose poems about it are among the most famous in Chinese literature. Explore the temples and halls, then enjoy the view over the gorge.

Shore excursions

• Fengdu Ghost City✓INCLUDED

  For nearly 2,000 years, Fengdu has been known in Chinese folklore as the gateway to the underworld. Its temples on Mingshan Mountain show how Taoist and Buddhist traditions imagined the afterlife and judgment of the soul. Climb through halls filled with vivid statues of underworld officials and guardians, and test your luck at traditional trials: crossing the Bridge of Helplessness or balancing on the Stone of Judgment, said to reveal whether you’ve lived a good life. It’s eerie and colorful, and one of the most unusual stops on the Yangtze.

Shore excursions

• Chongqing City Tour: Jiefangbei & Hongya Cave✓INCLUDED

  Chongqing is a mountain megacity built on steep hills where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers meet. Begin at Jiefangbei, the pedestrian heart of downtown, centered on the Liberation Monument and surrounded by shops and street life. Then visit Hongya Cave, a complex of traditional stilt houses stacked up the cliffside above the Jialing River, packed with teahouses, snack stalls and souvenir shops. In the evening, take in the city from some of its best viewpoints, when Hongya Cave and the riverside skyline are lit up, before your farewell dinner.