How did it went? On September 14th, you posted that your flight will be in 2 days - did you had any luck getting a same-day Visa from the Chinese embassy (they still do those for some Nationalities imho) or did you got a round trip to HKG/TPE/etc. squeezed in? Some of those trips can be booked overnight, ie while you obviously won't sleep well that night, even with a full schedule in China it can be possible to do such strategy if there is no alternative.