The exit letter is the address: reading Chinese metro signage before you surface

Chinese metro stations are built to a scale that punishes guessing. A single interchange can run four hundred metres underground with eight lettered exits, and the one you choose decides whether your hotel is across the road or across a six-lane arterial with no crossing for two blocks.

Letters before street names

Every exit is lettered. You will see 出口 (chūkǒu), then A, B, C, D, and at larger stations A1, A2, B1. Locals navigate this way and so do delivery riders: not the north side of the avenue, but B2, turn left. Mapping apps end a walking route on the same letter, and each platform carries a board listing what every letter surfaces onto — a bank, a hospital, a long-distance bus terminus.

The letter matters because arterial streets in most large Chinese cities are wide and centrally fenced. Surfacing on the wrong side can add ten minutes and a pedestrian overpass with no lift. Read the exit board before you take the escalator; once you tap out, going back in to reach a different letter generally means paying again.

Underground, the letter is the address.

The scanner at the door

Every entrance in mainland China has a bag scanner and a staffed table. You put your bag on the belt, walk through the frame, and occasionally a handheld wand passes over you. If you are carrying a water bottle, staff may ask you to take a sip in front of them; holding it uncapped in your hand shortens the exchange.

Queues bunch around 08:00 and again near 18:00. At big interchanges the entrance closest to the street corner is almost always the busiest — walking thirty metres to the next lettered entrance often puts you through the frame faster than waiting.

One code, most cities

Inside Alipay, under the transport section, is the 乘车码 (chéngchē mǎ) — a transit QR that opens gates in dozens of cities without a separate app for each metro system. Bind your card before you fly, raise your screen brightness at the gate, and let the reader take the code rather than tapping your phone against it. Coverage varies by city, so check that your destination appears in the list.

请从B2口出，右转步行三分钟。

If the code fails, the fallback is physical and still everywhere: a ticket machine that takes notes and returns a plastic single-journey token. You drop the token into the slot on the way out, which is why nobody hands one back to you.