Tianjin: where to stay, and how to use the half-hour train from Beijing

Overview

Tianjin is an enormous municipality with a small visitable city inside it. Almost everything a visitor comes for sits within three kilometres of one bend of the Hai River: the former concession quarters on both banks, the old city west of them, and the riverside walk between. The newest and tallest part of the city — Binhai, on the coast — is forty-odd kilometres east and holds nothing a short visit needs.

The fact that reorganises everything else is the train. Beijing South to Tianjin Station takes about half an hour, over roughly 120 km, on intercity services running all day. So many people reading this are not planning a holiday here at all: they are deciding whether to give Tianjin a day out of a Beijing trip, or to sleep here and commute in. Both work. The commute costs you the second leg at the Beijing end, usually longer than the train itself. If your trip is longer than either, size the city honestly: two days covers the concession streets, Wudadao, the old city and two breakfasts without hurrying, and a third is comfortable rather than necessary. The train runs both ways, so a longer stay here is best spent with some of its days in Beijing.

Be clear about what the city is, because it gets oversold in two opposite directions. It is not Beijing’s seaside neighbour — the sea is an hour away and irrelevant to a visit — and it is not a European fantasy in Chinese dress. The concession quarters were foreign-governed territories — nine of them, taken by treaty after military defeat from 1860 onwards, and not all returned until 1947 — and what stands there now is a dense concentration of 1900s–1930s foreign-built architecture on working streets: some of it restored into eating-and-drinking strips, much of it offices and flats with plaques on them. There is no wall, no palace, no single monument. If you want a checklist of sights, this is the wrong city; if you want a morning of low-rise brick streets and the street breakfast Tianjin is genuinely known for, it is a very good one.

Where to stay

The axis is the river. Tianjin Station sits on the north-east bank; most of the concession quarters people come to walk — the British, French and German ones — are on the south-west bank, five minutes away over the bridge. One warning first: check where a room actually is. Rooms sold as being in Tianjin are routinely out in Binhai, an hour east on metro line 9 and a separate city in practice. The municipality is the size of a small country and the address will not tell you — the district will, so look for Heping, Nankai or Hebei in the listing and treat anything else as a suburb until you have measured the walk to Tianjin Station. The second warning is the one that actually strands people: a licensed hotel outside restricted areas is required by law to take foreign guests, but many of them — the cheaper places above all — are not set up for the mandatory foreign-guest registration and will turn you away at the desk regardless. Book somewhere that lists its rooms in English; a hotel that chooses to appear there is one that can register a foreign passport.

The short version, if you would rather not weigh four: first visit, two or three nights, here to walk — Jiefang North Road or Xiaobailou, and accept the price. Arriving late and leaving early — the station side. Wanting quiet, and the walking to start at your own door — Wudadao.

Around Tianjin Station and the Italian quarter

The north-east bank, in Hebei district. Tianjin Station is where the Beijing trains arrive and where metro lines 2, 3 and 9 meet, and the surviving grid of the former Italian concession is about a kilometre from the concourse. Stay here if you are doing the city in a day and a half, or arriving late and leaving early. But the Italian quarter has been restored into a bar-and-restaurant strip, it is loud on weekend evenings, and it is small enough to walk out of in ten minutes; the rest of the station side is ordinary mid-rise city, so you will cross the river for almost everything.

Jiefang North Road and Xiaobailou

Straight over Jiefang Bridge — a 1927 double-leaf bascule bridge, built to open for river traffic — is the core of the former British and French concessions, in Heping district. Jiefang North Road was Victoria Road, the banking street of the 1920s, and its heavy neo-classical bank buildings still run almost unbroken towards Tai’an Road. South of them is Xiaobailou; a few streets west is Binjiang Dao, the main pedestrian shopping street. Stay here to walk to nearly everything, which from this base you can. What you give up is evenings and money: it is an office and shopping district, so the bank street is extraordinary at nine in the morning and empty at nine at night, and rooms here are expensive.

Wudadao, the Five Great Avenues

South-west of the centre, still in Heping: five parallel streets — Chongqing, Changde, Dali, Munan and Machang — carrying a couple of hundred villas and apartment blocks put up in the 1920s and 1930s in British, French, Italian, German and Spanish styles. Low-rise, leafy and quiet to sleep in. Stay here for that, and because the best walking in Tianjin starts at your door. The trade-off is that it is residential in the full sense: almost nothing open after dark, nothing on the doorstep in the evening, and line 1 from Yingkoudao or Xiaobailou at the northern edge — or a half-hour walk — to reach the station and the river.

The old city and the Drum Tower, in Nankai

West of the concessions, on the same bank. The cheapest of the four, and the closest to the morning food, which in this city is not a small thing. Be precise about what is there, though. The walled city itself was cleared long ago, Ancient Culture Street opened in the 1980s in Qing style and sells souvenirs, and the Drum Tower beside it is a rebuild; that much is oversold and you should discount it. What is not a rebuild stands behind them: the Tianhou Palace, founded in 1326 and standing in the middle of that souvenir street; Yuhuangge, from 1368 and among the oldest buildings left in Tianjin; and the Confucian Temple on Dongmennei Avenue, begun in 1436 and the most complete pre-modern building complex left in the Tianjin region. You are a good walk further from the concession streets, which are the reason to be here.

When to go

September and October are the best weeks of the year: warm, dry, and with the clearest air the city gets.

Summer is hot and sticky — July averages around 27°C — and most of the year’s rain falls in July and August, in short heavy bursts rather than steady drizzle. Winter is cold, dry and windy off the plain, January averaging a couple of degrees below freezing, and it is the heating season, when the whole Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei plain has its worst air. The pattern is worth knowing: a windy cold day here is bright and clear, and a still, windless cold snap is when the air turns bad, sometimes for days together. Spring is dry and blustery, and April can bring dust blown in off the Gobi.

Two dates to plan around rather than through: the first week of October and the fortnight around Spring Festival, when domestic travel peaks. The trains from Beijing sell out, the tourist streets are shoulder to shoulder, and over Spring Festival many small places close.

Getting there & around

Take the train from Beijing, and take one that ends at Tianjin Station. Some services terminate at Tianjin West, out in Hongqiao on metro lines 1, 4 and 6, others at Tianjin South in the south-western suburbs; both are usable, but they add a metro leg where Tianjin Station drops you on the river a bridge from the concession quarters. Check which one a train uses before you buy. Chinese rail is fully reserved — a named seat on a named train, bought against your passport and checked against it at the gate — so there is no turn-up-and-board, and on a holiday weekend a day trip planned that morning can simply fail. Buy the day before at the latest, not over breakfast on the day.

Most readers will not fly into Tianjin’s own airport, though it is the easiest of the three if you do: it sits at the end of metro line 2, which runs into Tianjin Station with no change. The two Beijing airports are not interchangeable here. From Daxing a direct intercity train reaches Tianjin West in about three quarters of an hour. From Capital there is no rail link at all — either a long-distance coach, direct but a couple of hours, or into Beijing and out again from Beijing South. Given the choice, arrive at Daxing — but check that your landing time lines up with a train, because the Daxing line is nothing like the all-day service out of Beijing South, and it puts you at Tianjin West rather than Tianjin Station.

Settle one thing before you book any of it. Entry to China runs on a small number of tracks: visa-free entry for some nationalities, a transit-only window for others that limits both how long you may stay and where you may go, and a full application with weeks of lead time for everyone else. Which of them applies to your passport has a definite answer, and it has to be answered before you buy flights, not after.

Once here, walk. The metro is large — thirteen lines — clean and cheap, and worth it for Wudadao or the end of a long day, but the stretch that matters is on foot: Tianjin Station, over Jiefang Bridge, down the bank street, through Xiaobailou and into Wudadao is under an hour of walking and the best thing to do in the city. Line 9 runs out to Binhai in about an hour, and the Binhai Library is a further ten minutes on foot from Shiminguangchang station, so the round trip is most of a half-day; worth it only if that building is a picture you specifically came for. Do not rent a car. For the way back from Wudadao once the metro has shut, ride-hailing runs in English inside the Chinese payment apps you need anyway, and is the ordinary way to cross the city at that hour; if you flag a street taxi instead, have the destination showing in Chinese characters on your phone, because the driver will not read the Latin name.

Practicalities

Sort out payment and your phone before you arrive, not at a stall. Paying by scanning a QR code is close to universal, and the two apps that run it are Alipay and WeChat; both now let a foreign card be linked using your home mobile number, but the setup wants patience and it is far easier done before you fly than at a counter. Cash is legal tender and will be accepted, though small vendors may not hold change for a large note. Most non-Chinese search, mapping and messaging services are unreachable from a Chinese connection, and the tools for getting around that are themselves unreachable from inside — so whatever you intend to have on the phone has to be on it before you land.

Mapping deserves its own line: published maps in China use an offset coordinate system, so a foreign app can place you a few hundred metres from where you are — maddening when you are hunting one bank building in a row of them. A Chinese mapping app, or a printed plan of the concession streets, fixes it. Stations have airport-style security, so allow twenty minutes more than feels necessary at Beijing South.

The meal to organise your day around is breakfast. Tianjin’s food reputation is a morning reputation and it is earned on the street: stalls set up before dawn, work through the commute and are packed away by mid-morning, and the best of them stand on residential corners rather than on the tourist streets. If you want a concentration rather than a lucky corner, walk to Xibeijiao — the old city’s north-west corner, with a station of its own on line 1 — and the queues there are not for show. The famous snack names have mostly become sit-down restaurants on the tourist streets, charging several times what the same thing costs off a griddle, and they are not better for it. Eat early and standing up, and treat lunch as an afterthought.

Signage on the metro and at the mainline stations is bilingual; away from them there is very little English, noticeably less than in Beijing, so download an offline translation app before you come. Otherwise the city is straightforward and safe late at night, and the hazard is traffic rather than crime: electric scooters are near-silent and ridden on the pavements, and cars may turn right on a red light without stopping for a green man. Look before you step off a kerb.