Nightlife in China

China's bar culture has matured considerably, with craft beer taprooms, Japanese-influenced whisky bars, and serious cocktail spots now spread across every major city. Shanghai leads on cocktail ambition, with a cluster of internationally recognized bars in the Former French Concession where bartenders train with the same rigor you'd find in Tokyo or London. Beijing's bar scene splits between the expat-heavy Sanlitun strip, which runs loud and commercial into the early hours, and the quieter hutong bars tucked into alleyways around Gulou and Nanluoguxiang. The rooms are tiny, the music is lower, and the crowd skews local and creative. Chengdu's drinking culture is more relaxed and arguably more fun for a newcomer, with long streets of open-air bars where locals drag tables outside regardless of the hour. You'll also find craft beer making serious inroads in almost every Chinese city now, with taprooms dedicated to domestic craft labels that have nothing to prove to anyone.

China may be the best country in the world for eating after midnight, which is part of why the nightlife works as well as it does. The logic is different from Western bar culture. People often eat heavily before going out, then eat again around 1 or 2am as bars start to wind down. In Beijing, this means lamb skewers from street grills that appear after dark in neighborhoods like Guijie, which is sometimes called Ghost Street. Dozens of restaurants stay open all night specializing in crayfish and spicy hotpot. Shanghai has its own late-night food geography, with noodle shops in the Former French Concession that attract a post-club crowd from around midnight. Chengdu is predictable in the best way: hotpot, somewhere, is always open. The skewered street food known as chuanr is a near-universal late-night option across northern cities, cooked over charcoal at sidewalk stalls and eaten standing up.