Hi, I’m Gloria.
I’m a Shanghai native — born here, raised here, and back here for good. In between, I lived in the US for six years for college and grad school, where I made friends from places I’d only seen on maps.
During those six years, my friends would travel to Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea — and ask me constantly about China. A few came to visit me. A lot more wanted to but chickened out at the visa form.
The same questions kept coming up. Do I need a VPN? Can I pay with my credit card? How do I get a taxi without speaking Chinese? Is the visa really that complicated?
I’d answer them one by one — over messages, over coffee, in long emails I’d basically already written three times that month. Sometimes I’d send them an English blog post to back me up, only to re-read it and notice the gaps: written in 2019, or sponsored, or by someone who hasn’t actually been here recently.
Then cousins of mine moved abroad, and their friends started asking the same things. And I noticed something simple: people genuinely want to come to China. The interest is there. The bridge isn’t.
There’s no honest, updated, English-language platform that just tells foreign travelers what they actually need to know — and connects them to someone who can help when they get stuck.
So I’m building one.
What SINOGO is
SINOGO is the China travel resource I wish existed when my friends first started asking. It’s independent — I have a separate day job, I don’t take affiliate fees, I don’t accept sponsored placements, and I write about what I personally use and test. When something doesn’t live up to the hype, I say so.
- The 4 essentials. Get In (visa rules), Get Connected (Alipay + WeChat + VPN), Get Cash (payment without a Chinese bank account), Get Moving (airport, rail, city transit). The setup nobody else explains in plain English.
- City guides. Where to eat, where to stay, what to skip — by city. Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, and more as I keep traveling.
- Interactive tools (coming soon). Visa checker, fee calculator, transit planner — small utilities for the moments you actually need them on the road.
- Custom itineraries — built around your dates, your pace, and your interests
- Curated trip packages — when you want something already figured out
- Booking concierge — I handle trains, hotels, drivers, and tickets in Chinese, so you don’t have to
Meet Bao
Bao is SINOGO’s mascot — a small pink piglet in a gold-trimmed tang suit. He pops up across the site, in our videos, and on @sino.gogo, walking you through the food, the streets, the trains, and the small daily moments that make traveling here feel less foreign.
If something on this site sounds friendlier than I do, that’s probably Bao talking.
Why I’m doing this
I didn’t grow up planning to run a travel site. I grew up in Shanghai, watched it change, lived abroad, came back — and noticed there’s a gap I happen to be standing in the middle of: between a country I know inside out, and the people who want to know it.
Chinese, but bilingual. Insider, but with a foreigner’s instincts about what’s confusing. That’s a useful place to stand if you’re trying to make this country easier to visit.
I want China to be easy for you. Not perfect. Not curated. Just easy — the way it is for me, every day.
If even one person has a smoother trip because of something I wrote, I’ll consider this worth it.