Serica.
The Romans called the country at the far end of the silk route Serica — the land where silk came from. They never got there. It stayed a place described entirely at second hand for the better part of a thousand years.
Why day journeys
Most people who travel in China are not on a China tour. They are there for a fortnight across several cities, or for a conference, or living there for a year and taking weekends. What they need is not a package — it is one very well-run day, in a place where a badly run day is easy to end up with.
China is unusually punishing for the independent traveller in specific, solvable ways. Entry to the major sites has moved to capped, real-name, ID-linked advance reservation through Chinese-language apps that generally require a mainland mobile number. Domestic visitor volumes mean the difference between arriving at opening and arriving at ten is the difference between two different places. And the things worth understanding — why a garden is composed the way it is, why an irrigation work from 256 BC still functions — do not explain themselves on a plaque.
Those are operational problems. They are solved by turning up earlier, holding the tickets in advance, and putting one competent person with you for the whole day. That is the entire company.
What we do and do not do
We design the itineraries, we reserve the entry, we assess and name the guide, we put the vehicle on the road, and we are the party you contract with. If a day does not go the way it was sold, the responsibility is ours and the remedy comes from us.
We do not run a coach fleet, we do not consolidate strangers into a departure to make it viable, and we do not take a commission from a shop. All of that is written down on our operating standard page.
How we run a city
The bar is deliberately narrow, because most of what goes wrong on a Chinese day tour is an operating problem rather than a sightseeing problem.
- Guides who hold a current Chinese guide licence and who we have assessed ourselves for spoken English. We are looking for someone who can hold a room, not someone who can recite dates.
- Licensed charter vehicles with current road transport permits and professional drivers, sized with spare room for the party.
- Entry to every ticketed site reserved in advance against the passport you travel on — nobody is sent to a ticket window.
- Our itinerary, our timings and our no-commission rule, with a standing prohibition on adding a shopping stop.
- Every departure reviewed afterwards, and anyone who does not meet the standard not used again.
A named, registered company
Serica Journeys is the trading name of L Z Development Pty Ltd, a registered proprietary company (registration number 167 079 727). You can verify that on the public business register, and the registered office is on our contact page.
That matters more than it sounds. It means your contract is with a named company, your confirmation is a plain-English document, your payment goes to a company bank account, and there is a registered address answering for the day — not an unnamed local supplier you would have to find yourself.
The name, since people ask
Serica is what Rome called China, taken from ser, silk. It was a country known only by what came out of it along a road nobody at the western end had travelled. We liked it as a name for a company whose job is to close exactly that gap — between the country people have read about and the one they are standing in.
Planning a trip, or already in China?
Tell us your cities and dates. We will come back with an itinerary and a price in writing.