Fourteen bilingual cards for the exact moments China travel guides skip — the ones where you're standing at a counter with a queue behind you. Show the Chinese side. Read the English side. Get unstuck in under a minute.
Stuck right now? Jump straight to it: payment · hotel · taxi · doctor
Free, no signup, no email. Phone-sized images + one print-ready PDF · works offline
Every guide tells you how to set things up. Almost none tell you what to do when the setup fails — on a Sunday, with no English-speaking staff, and your bank app throwing an error you've never seen.
In the order they actually happen: the cash-and-SIM deadlock on day one, having no Chinese number, payment, attraction tickets, hotel pushback, taxis, trains, food, medical, getting lost.
Each card leads with large, plain Chinese written for a clerk or driver — not machine-translated slogans. No explaining in broken Mandarin.
The English side gives the three moves that actually work, including the official channel and the fallback that always works.
Card 1 — payment declined. This is the one people need most often.
不好意思，我的外国银行卡刚才支付失败了。可能是银行的安全验证，不是余额不足。请问可以换一种方式吗？
① 我再试一次，请稍等 ② 我用现金 ③ 请帮我看看金额对不对。谢谢您！
The cards handle the counter. These handle the paperwork before you fly — visa-free entry, transit, accommodation registration. Each page shows the date it was checked and any policy expiry.
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Each card is one problem. The Chinese side is numbered, and the English side says the same thing under the same number — so you know exactly what you're showing someone. Built for a phone screen: large type, no scrolling. Tap any card to save it; they're free.
Cards 6 and 12 have a blank line on purpose — the taxi address and the invoice details are the two things we cannot know in advance. Fill them in with any app that draws on a photo (or print the PDF and use a pen). Everything else you can use straight from the image.
Written from inside China, by someone who lives with the systems that confuse visitors — and updates the cards as the rules change.
No. Save the images to your phone and they open offline — which matters, because the moment you need card 6 is usually the moment your data stops working.
Every Chinese line is written to be read by a clerk, driver or front desk — short, polite, and unambiguous. Large type, plain wording, no slang.
Yes. It's designed for smaller cities and independent hotels, where English is least available and a written Chinese sentence does the most work.
Yes — no payment, no email, no account. Save the images, print the PDF, send the link to whoever is flying to China.
Each card carries a verification date. When China changes a rule, the cards change and the date moves with them.
Save them to your phone in two minutes, before you fly. Free, and free to share.
No signup · no email · works offline · last verified 2026-10-20