125 of these 211 are things you can walk up and take part in, not things you buy a seat for. Another 78 are for watching. Almost all of them are free, and almost none of them are advertised anywhere.
139 need no Chinese at all. 45 go more easily with some, and 27 are in dialect rather than standard Chinese, which is worth knowing before you travel for one. The background is on the everyday leisure page.
These are activities rather than addresses, so they are grouped by what people are doing. Where a place matters, the entry names it.
What People Are Doing
| Kind | Entries | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Teahouses | 30 | A pot of tea buys a table for as long as you want it. In Chengdu the water is topped up all afternoon; in Guangzhou the same habit comes with trolleys of dim sum at half past six in the morning. |
| Morning Exercise and Square Dancing | 41 | The two ends of the day belong to whoever turns up. Taiji and shuttlecock at dawn, dance lines at dusk, and in both cases the way in is to stand at the back and copy. |
| Opera, Storytelling and Choirs | 37 | Amateur singers meet in park corridors and old teahouses to work through the arias, and a lot of it is free. Several of these forms are sung in dialect, which matters more than the ticket price. |
| Parks, Riversides and Songbirds | 34 | What a Chinese park is for: walking, sitting, the cages hung in the trees at dawn, the matchmaking corner at the weekend, and the embankment in the evening. |
| Board Games, Cards and Street Games | 31 | Chinese chess on a stone table with a crowd around it, card games that change name every province, and the lane games that come back out at New Year. |
| Outdoors, Ice and Night Food | 25 | Running the city wall, cycling the lake, cutting a hole in the river ice, and the skewers and beer that the evening ends with. |
| Song and Dance of the Peoples | 13 | Circle dances, antiphonal singing and instruments that belong to particular peoples rather than to the country as a whole. Most of these rings open up for a visitor. |
Being There on the Right Evening
Most of this costs nothing and needs no booking. What it needs is being in the right district at half past six rather than in a restaurant across town. Tell our local team which city and which week, and they will say what is on and where people actually go.