8-Day Sportsmanship & Team Leadership Camp

Morning — Arrival in Beijing
As soon as you step off the plane at Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK), your guide will be waiting just outside the baggage-claim area holding a name sign. A private vehicle will transfer you to your hotel, where your guide assists with check-in and provides a brief orientation. The rest of the day is yours to relax and recover from the long flight.

Morning — taiji in the Temple of Heaven park
The Temple of Heaven was laid out in 1420 and rebuilt in the eighteenth century, and the park around it has been a public exercise ground for ordinary Beijing residents for centuries. Shortly after dawn it fills: groups doing taiji, sword forms, fan dances, shuttlecock kicking, ballroom dancing in the corner by the east gate, and a choir singing revolutionary songs under the cypresses. Your teacher is a local instructor who works the same spot every morning. You start with standing postures and breathing, then the first few movements of the twenty-four form - slow enough that the difficulty is not the movement but the standing still between them.

Late morning — wushu fundamentals
From the park the group moves to a training hall for a wushu session: stance work, basic kicks, and a short changquan sequence taught in sections. The point is not fighting but the two things Chinese martial arts train hardest - balance and the discipline of repeating something badly until it becomes good. Expect to be corrected constantly, and expect the sequence to be demonstrably better after ninety minutes than it was after ten.

Lunch
Noodles and dumplings near the training hall; the group eats early because the afternoon is outdoors.

Afternoon — team challenges on the Olympic Green
The Olympic Park was laid out for the 2008 Games along a 3-kilometre axis running from the Bird's Nest stadium to the Water Cube, with the 2008 cauldron, the National Indoor Stadium, and the 2022 Winter Olympics venues added at the northern end. Working in mixed teams, you run a course of checkpoints across the Green: a route-finding leg with a map and no phones, a timing challenge in which the team must arrive together rather than fast, a problem-solving station, and a physical leg that rewards the slowest member's pace. Scores are kept, and the debrief is about what happened to communication when the team was tired - which is the whole reason for running it.

Evening — debrief and dinner
Dinner near the Bird's Nest, then a short team debrief on leadership under fatigue: who spoke, who was listened to, and who stopped contributing without anyone noticing. The evening ends with the next day's plan and an early night.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — Mutianyu Great Wall
Drive to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, prized for its scenery, good preservation, and lighter crowds than Badaling. Ride the scenic cable car up, then hike a gentle stretch with panoramic mountain views; many enjoy the thrilling toboggan ride down the hillside.

Afternoon — Return to Beijing
Return to Beijing for some rest and relaxation at your hotel after the morning's hiking.

Evening — Casual Dinner
Enjoy a casual dinner at a local restaurant to round off the day.

Meals
Lunch and dinner included.

Morning — Tiananmen Square & Forbidden City
Walk across Tiananmen Square, the world's largest public square, past the Monument to the People's Heroes and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong (viewed from outside). Pass through Tiananmen Gate into the Forbidden City, the Ming–Qing imperial palace built in 1420 with some 980 surviving buildings, a UNESCO site. Your guide leads you along the central axis to halls such as the Hall of Supreme Harmony and the Palace of Heavenly Purity.

Lunch — Near the Forbidden City
Enjoy lunch at a family-friendly restaurant close to the Forbidden City.

Afternoon — Wangfujing Street
Explore Wangfujing, one of Beijing's premier shopping streets, with department stores and a pedestrian walkway. The nearby Snack Street offers a glimpse of local street-food culture for the adventurous.

Evening — At your leisure
Dinner is at a Wangfujing restaurant; the rest of the evening is free to enjoy the lit-up street.

Meals
Lunch and dinner are included (Wangfujing area).

Morning — over the divide
The flight from Beijing to Chengdu crosses one of the sharpest environmental boundaries in China. North of the Qinling range the country is dry, cold in winter, and organised around wheat and coal; south of it the Sichuan basin is humid, mild, foggy, and organised around rice, bamboo and tea. The Qinling itself is a mountain wall roughly a thousand kilometres long, and it has separated the two regions politically as well as climatically for most of Chinese history - the basin has been an independent kingdom more than once, most famously Shu, and it has been a fallback capital in wartime, including during the Second World War when Chongqing in the same basin held out for eight years.

Early afternoon — arrival in Chengdu
Chengdu is a city of about twenty million people in a municipality and it presents as relaxed, which is not the same thing as quiet. The visible economy of the street is food, tea and retail. Your guide meets the group at the airport and takes everyone to the hotel; after check-in there is time to walk before the afternoon session, and the shape of the next two days is explained: one day of traditional physical culture and team challenges, and one day that closes the programme.

Late afternoon — the old lanes
The Wide and Narrow Alleys quarter, restored and reopened in the early 2000s, is the most legible version of old Chengdu: Qing-dynasty courtyard houses, rebuilt shopfronts, a few working residences kept behind the tourist frontage, and courtyard teahouses where people sit for hours over one cup. The party walks the three parallel lanes and the guide points out what is original and what is reconstruction - an important distinction in a city that has been rebuilt several times, most recently after serious damage in the 2008 earthquake in the surrounding region.

Evening — a Sichuan meal and the next day's brief
Dinner is Sichuan food, ordered at a level of heat the group can actually eat, with the guide explaining the difference between the burning heat of chilli and the numbing effect of Sichuan pepper, which is what makes the cuisine distinctive. Over dinner the teams for tomorrow's challenges are drawn and the rules are explained: mixed teams, points for cooperation rather than speed, and one station that can only be completed if the whole team finishes together.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Chengdu.

Morning — Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding
At the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, observe playful cubs munching bamboo and climbing trees in spacious enclosures. Your visit also introduces the conservation efforts working to protect this beloved endangered species, from breeding programs to habitat protection.

Lunch — Sichuan Hotpot
Feast on Sichuan hotpot at Haidilao, where numbing peppercorns and fiery broths ignite the senses. Cooking fresh ingredients at the table makes for a lively, interactive meal.

Afternoon — Jinli Ancient Street
Explore Jinli Ancient Street, a Tang Dynasty-style lane lined with tea houses, snack stalls, and artisan workshops. It is a pleasant place to browse local crafts and soak up Chengdu's relaxed pace.

Evening — Sichuan Opera
Cap the day with a Sichuan opera performance, featuring face-changing performers and fire-spitting acts. The show highlights one of the region's most distinctive theatrical traditions.

Morning — Sichuan martial arts
Sichuan has its own martial tradition. The Emei school, named for the mountain south-west of the basin, is counted among the country's major systems, and it is known for close-range work, short power and a strong emphasis on the internal arts - the same family of practice that produced taiji. The session runs in a training hall with a coach: a warm-up that is longer than most participants expect, stance and footwork, a short form taught in sections, and partner drills with two-step and three-step sequences. The drills matter more than the form. Working with a partner requires the two participants to agree on a pace, and the coach will stop the room whenever one pair is pushing harder than the other.

Late morning — balance and coordination
The second block adds equipment: short sticks for coordination, and a rope-skipping and balance circuit that is harder than it looks and is scored. Teams record their own times, which is the first point in the day where honesty matters more than speed. The coach finishes with a short talk on why traditional training emphasises repetition over variety, which is a lesson the group will use in the afternoon.

Lunch
A light Sichuan lunch, deliberately without heavy chilli: noodles, steamed dumplings, a clear soup and fruit. The afternoon is on the water.

Afternoon — dragon boats on the Jinjiang
Dragon boat racing is a festival sport with a fixed ritual calendar, raced on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month to mark the death of the poet Qu Yuan, and Chengdu has club crews that train on the Jinjiang, the river diverted through the city by the Dujiangyan irrigation system built in the third century BC. The afternoon begins with a safety and technique session on land and then on the water: the stroke, the rate, the role of the steersperson and the drum. Then the crews race. A dragon boat of twenty paddlers is the least forgiving team sport there is - the boat simply does not move if the timing is uneven - which is why it is used here rather than any land-based activity.

Evening — debrief and dinner
The debrief compares the two halves of the day: the drills, where cooperation was one-to-one and quiet, and the boat, where it was collective and loud. Each team is asked who steered, who set the rate, who was listened to and who was not, and whether those roles were chosen or simply assumed. Dinner in the city follows, then the group returns to the hotel for the closing session the next morning.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Chengdu.

Morning — the Closing Debrief
Every session of the week has been followed by a short debrief, and the last one is the longest, because it is the only one with the whole record in front of it. Each team presents what it noted: who set the pace on the wall walk and whether that was the person the group expected, how the boat was called on the Jinjiang, what happened when the orienteering leg required the slowest member to arrive with the group, and where the group's own decision-making slowed it down. The facilitator pushes on the gap between what the team says it values and what its behaviour showed, and the group writes up what it will change on returning.

Late Morning — Departure
Transfer to Chengdu Tianfu International Airport (TFU) or Shuangliu (CTU) for the flight home, or to Chengdu East Railway Station for the high-speed service to Chongqing or Xi'an, with assistance on luggage and check-in.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.