Beijing eSIM — plans from ₹299.00

Beijing is served by two very different airports. Capital (PEK) is the older and closer one, linked to the city by the Airport Express to Dongzhimen; Daxing (PKX) is the vast newer airport far to the south, connected by its own express line to Caoqiao and by high-speed rail. Which one you land at changes your evening completely, and neither is a good place to be queueing for a local SIM, since real-name registration with a passport at an operator counter takes time you do not have after a long flight.

DiDi handles ride-hailing, and the subway is fast and cheap, but both need a connected phone, and Beijing's scale means a wrong assumption about which airport your hotel expects you at is expensive. An eSIM installed at home over Wi-Fi is already in place: it activates when your phone registers on a Chinese network after landing, validity starts at that first connection, and you can confirm your transfer from the gate.

China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom cover the capital, and your plan follows whichever partner signal is strongest. 5G is dense across the whole urban area, from the Forbidden City and Wangfujing to Sanlitun, Chaoyang, Haidian and the fifth ring road, with 4G behind it. The subway carries signal in tunnels and stations across the network, which matters on a system this large. Day trips vary in a predictable way: Badaling and Mutianyu on the Great Wall have good coverage at the visitor areas and along the restored sections, while the wilder unrestored stretches at Jiankou and Gubeikou lose signal between towers, and the mountain roads out that way have dead patches.

Sort out app access before you fly, because mainland networks do not reach many widely used international services and the workarounds are hard to arrange once you are in the country. Download offline maps with Chinese characters as well as pinyin, since taxi drivers and signage use the former. Keep data for DiDi, translation, subway QR entry, and the ticketing apps that now handle timed entry to the Forbidden City and other major sites, which cannot be done at the gate. Hotel Wi-Fi is quick; cafe Wi-Fi usually asks for a mainland number, so hotspot from your own plan instead. Great Wall days are long and cold, so carry a power bank. Shanghai and Guangzhou share the China eSIM.