Home / Staying a while
Almost everyone comes to Xingyi for two or three days. Quietly, it is one of the easiest places in China to simply stay a while — a week, a month, a season.
It is cheap, it is beautiful, the pace is slow, and since the high-speed railway and the airport arrived, it is no longer remote enough to feel stuck. For the growing number of people who can work from anywhere, or who simply have the time, that is a rare combination — and almost no foreigner has thought to do it here yet.
Xingyi is a prefecture city — not a village, and not a megacity, which turns out to be the sweet spot. You get a landscape most people never tire of, a genuinely slow small-city rhythm, and a cost of living a fraction of a big Chinese city, let alone a Western one. But you also get the things that make daily life comfortable: hospitals, a couple of modern shopping malls, supermarkets, cafés, food delivered to your door, high-speed rail and an airport. And because the crowds only come on the public holidays, most of the year you have the valley — and the town — largely to yourself.
This is where we earn our keep, so we will be straight with you.
Longer than a month needs a visa. A tourist (L) visa is typically 30 days, extendable once at the local exit-entry bureau. For a stay of several months you would be looking at a longer-term visa and some planning — China does not yet have a simple "digital nomad" visa, so this is worth sorting before you fall for the place rather than after.
You must register your address. Stay in a rental rather than a hotel and Chinese law requires you to register with the local police within 24 hours of arriving, with your passport and your rental contract. It is quick, it is routine, and if you miss it the penalty is usually just a warning — but it is exactly the kind of Chinese-only errand we handle with you so it is painless.
Daily life runs in Chinese. Renting a place, utilities, a SIM card, Alipay and WeChat Pay, deliveries, a trip to the doctor — almost all of it is in Chinese, and almost no one here speaks English. That is wonderful for immersion and hard on your own. This friction is precisely the thing we exist to remove.
For a longer stay there is no reason to pay hotel rates. Xingyi has plenty of comfortable apartments and houses to rent, short-term or long, at prices that tend to surprise people. We can find one that fits what you want, negotiate it, handle the contract and the police registration, and get your phone, payments and deliveries working — so you can arrive and simply start living.
Prefer us to build a whole trip or stay around you? See bespoke Xingyi.
Think of us as the English-speaking desk that makes a Chinese small city liveable: finding and setting up your place, the paperwork, the day-to-day fixing, and a real person on call when something comes up in a language you don't read. Tell us roughly how long you are thinking of staying and what you need, and we will tell you honestly what it takes.
If you want a very long stay, the visa side takes real planning; if you need everything in English, daily life here will test you. But if you have the time, and you want to actually live somewhere beautiful, calm and inexpensive in a China most travellers never see — few places make a better case than this one. And you would not have to work out the hard parts alone.
If you're weighing it up, it helps to know how easy it now is to get here, which season suits you, and how accommodation works for foreigners. When you're ready to talk it through, tell us what you have in mind.