Xiefei is right. A passport can get discounts most of the time but TIC...

Even at 50% percent off (and I doubt in most cases just showing a foreign passport will help) these places are still over priced and boring.

Boring? Maybe, I would go from Beichen to the Minzu Village by bus, go in the park, chat with and photograph the pretty girls, have lunch with them and kill about 6 hours. Cost 8 yuan.

But then depends on how you define boring.

@geezer I agree that that is the type of travel I prefer myself, and usually those trips cost nothing really. Those little trip[s are not listed in travel sites and such. The more popular a place becomes the less appeal and charm it retains it seems. I am not going to say that all of China is boring of course, but most places that require an entry fee, especially of 200 to 300 or more rmb, is going to be, for me anyway, a let down. There are many little temples and narrow alleys right here in KM and on the edges of the city few people know about. I never tire of them.

@zhudan: I think pretty as you do. I try hard to see beyond the tourist crap and often it is just a short walk away from the tourists. I have traveled to more than 90 cities in China, usually alone and took more than 100K photos.

Like you I wandered the alleys of Kunming and got a lot of great shots of real people. I would sit and talk to people as well. I did this all over China, saw both "ends" of the Great Wall, watched Lijiang go to hell and Beijing Hutongs disappear. I saw beautiful old temples get renovated into look alike boxes with plastic foam Buddhas. Along the way I stopped taking photos of things and switched to photos of old and young faces.

Fortunately, I did most of my travel before entrance fees got to be the thing. I flew most of the time to save time but walked a lot when I got there. Rode in a car from Beijing to Dun Huang through Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Ningxia, and back through Qinghai, Shanxi. Rode buses, boats, ferries, horse carts and tuktuks. I liked to wander wet markets taking photos of faces (A tip: go take photos of people and get 20-30 prints made, go back the next day and give away the prints then you can take photos of everyone).

Getting old, I had a bucket list for 2014 but a stroke crippled me so I never made it to 100 cities.

I wouldn't say all of China is boring either, but places that require an entry fee are, indeed, obviously tourist SITES/SIGHTS, and so are obviously commercialized and programmed, physically and conceptually - not exactly unique to China, but tourism is still relatively new here - how many people traveled just to see things 20-25 years ago? - and is believed in for its entertainment value. Many of such places are well worth visiting anyway, but you can only do just so much of that sort of thing. Someday people may be able to look back and think it was all a bit weird - either that or everything will be 'entertainment', and nobody will know anything else.
And yeah, charging people just to enter a town, or what was once really 'a town', is a bit too much - but it moves money around.

Ok, I stand corrected with the passport discounts. It never worked for me which is why I got the Chinese one.
@Geezer- yup a bit of a hassle because their computer would only accept a Chinese ID # to register a new card. Took them a couple of days to figure out how to get it to accept my passport number as my ID. Good to know there are more of us "smart old guys" around Kunming. Lol

And I agree with the travel around bit. It is not like before. Now to go see most things only depress me seeing as how most everything morphed into an entertainment venue with reconstructed Disney Land buildings. With very few exceptions, I never entered a village that had the token idiot waiting to charge me an entrance fee. China holds an amazing variety of natural wonders, but I find other SE Asian countries much more to my liking to visit now that China feels the need to charge for a look. Pathetic really, and on principle I will not spend my money in such places.

A good many places in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are having cheaper entrance fees than China. Some even free, such as certain temples, hikes in Taiwan, botanical gardens etc.

Not all of them of course, but - at least it seems that - there is less of a ripoff and more transparency. And this is not even put in comparsion with average income, which is a lot lower in China.

I had a friend in Hangzhou who suffered from sleeplessness. The advice from here was —> you should start hiking (and drink less Dragon Well tea), well reply from there was that entrance ticket to mountain is 300¥ so wont do.

@Bucko My problem seemed to be my English name. Luckily, I have a Chinese name I could write so they used that, 傅强。 The passport number went here: 身份证号 and the visa number here: 证件便号.

I think using a passport to get a discount was probably due to getting someone who was hired to collect money but didn't want to deal with anything not in Chinese because laowai, as we all know, are a pain in the ass.

The 老年人卡 is magic and is never questioned in Yunnan. It does work in other provinces too, but not always. Acting like a smiling idiot helps as even Beijingers don't want to argue with pleasant old geezers. Mumbling 傻逼 doesn't work.