Sort your phone before you fly

The phone is the trip now. It's your wallet, your ticket, your map, your translator and your hotel door key, and roughly half of that works the moment you land if you do this bit at home. Here's the whole list.

Data: eSIM, roaming or a local SIM

• Travel eSIM — the least friction. Buy and install before you fly, it activates on landing, and it usually routes outside the mainland network, which means your usual apps keep behaving normally. Costs more per gigabyte than a local card.
• Home carrier roaming — fine for a short trip if your plan has an Asia day-rate you've actually read. It behaves like a travel eSIM would.
• Mainland SIM card — cheapest per gigabyte and genuinely useful for a long stay, but it changes which apps work and it needs a passport registration at the counter. Airport counters and official stores handle both.

The VPN question — do it before you land

Some foreign apps and websites don't load on the mainland network. Google's services, WhatsApp, Instagram, most Western news sites: the ones you'd reach for without thinking. Set this up on your home wifi, not in a hotel lobby, and check it works before the flight. The apps that matter on the ground — WeChat, Alipay, Didi, 12306 — work as they are for foreign users; the extra step is for everything else you'd like to keep using.

Offline everything, while you still have wifi

• An offline map area for each city. Save the whole metro area, not just the centre.
• The Chinese language pack in your translation app, plus the offline dictionary — camera translation with no signal is the difference between pointing and eating.
• A screenshot folder: hotel confirmations, the hotel address in Chinese, flight times, passport photo page, the Arrival Card QR, insurance details.
• The metro map as an image. Every station is signposted in English and Latin script, so the picture alone gets you around.

Power, the boring one

220V, two-pin sockets. Most North American plugs fit as-is; UK and European devices need an adapter. Older hotels rarely have a universal socket beside the bed, so a short cable and a small power bank solve a problem you'd otherwise meet at 1%.