How This Guide Is Made

This site answers one question: how to actually visit the Great Wall of China — which section, which ticket, which way there, and what the day looks like on arrival.

There is no byline on these pages, so the only thing worth judging them by is the method. This page describes it, and every statement below can be checked against the site itself rather than taken on trust.

Where the numbers come from

Different facts have different sources, and they are not interchangeable:

Admission prices, opening hours and what each section has — from the administrations that run the sections and their own ticketing systems.
Booking rules, release windows and daily quotas — from the official ticketing systems, with city tourism authorities as a cross-check.
Visa and transit rules — from China’s National Immigration Administration, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the relevant embassies. For countries with their own agreements, also from that country’s own immigration authority.
Transport — from the operators running the buses and trains.

Travel articles are not a source. Where they are the only thing available, whatever they support is marked as unconfirmed rather than written as fact.

How the numbers stay consistent

Nothing that changes is written into the articles. Prices, hours, distances, transport and visa rules live in a small set of data files, and the pages render them.

Three consequences, all visible from the outside:

One correction fixes everything. A price exists in exactly one place, so a single edit updates every page that shows it — and every language version at once. It is not possible for the ticket page and the section page to disagree, because neither of them holds the number.
The check date travels with the data. The data sets carry a date of last verification, and the tables that render prices, booking rules, transport and visa records print it next to the figures.
Visa records carry their own source. Each country’s entry has its own date and a link to the official notice it came from, so the claim and its evidence stay attached.

For the rules that move fastest — the booking windows and quotas at the busiest section — the data also carries the address of the official ticketing system, so the next check starts at the right place instead of in a search engine.

What is not promised anywhere on this site is a schedule. There is no “verified monthly”: there are dates of last verification, and they are shown to you.

When sources disagree

They do, often, and the rule is simple: an official source beats a widely repeated one. If there is no official source, the fact is marked as unconfirmed and written in hedged form rather than stated plainly.

Two real examples of that rule doing work:

Transit rules for India and the Philippines. A large number of travel sites list both countries as eligible for China’s visa-free transit scheme. They are not on the official lists. This site follows the official lists, which means our answer contradicts the more popular one.

The booking window at Badaling. Several sources give one figure; the official ticketing system gives a longer one. The site uses the figure from the ticketing system, and the data record keeps the address of that system so the next person to check does not have to find it again.

Neither example is here to claim a good record. They are here because they show what happens at the point where the sources split — which is the only part of a method that matters.

How the site is funded

Affiliate commissions. When a ticket or a tour is booked through one of the buttons here, the seller pays a share of what they earn on that sale. The price is the same as booking directly — the commission comes out of their margin.

The detail, including which pages carry commercial buttons and which do not, is on the affiliate disclosure. The short version: buttons appear where a reader has already decided and is choosing whom to buy from, and the clusters used for working out what kind of trip to take — visas, planning, the transport hub and most practical guides — carry none.

What this site does not do

It does not pass off other people’s experience as its own. No claim of a visit appears on any page.
It does not sell placement. No operator can buy a position in a recommendation, a comparison or a list.
No operator has any say in what is written here. Commercial links are marked as such; the recommendations are made independently of them.
It does not sell tickets, and it is not the official site of any Great Wall section. Each section is run by its own administration and sells through its own channels. If a page here contradicts a section’s own notice, the notice is right.

If something here is wrong

That is the message this site most wants to receive: name the page and what you saw instead, and the correction propagates everywhere the figure appears — how to reach us.