http://www.beijingkerrycentre.com/en/ccbd/index.htm

Branew Laundry
Business hour: Mon-Sun 08:00 - 20:00
Tel: (86 10) 85299411
Location: Kerry Mall B27

There might be laundry in backpaker havens like yangshoa, but we've found no such thing as laundry service in cities like Datong, Pingyao or Xian. There are dry cleaners that charge per piece and they are VERY expensive. The types of laundry we've found in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia are not to be had in China. We eventually paid the high cost of laundry at the Sheraton in Xian. Our advice is to bring a ton of clothing and be prepared to pay alot or do your own in the sink.

The sink thing works pretty well during these warmer months, and isn't so time consuming if you focus on things like socks, underwear, and polo/tee shirts. Also, bear in mind that tee shirts cost next to nothing in China... cheaper than hotel laundry services, for sure.

Still no easy laundry in China? It's a very funny thing. Before I travel to any country I've never been to, I try to figure out "the laundry situation" so I know what to bring. In some places, laundry is amazingly easy: I was just in Ecuador, and I paid only $1 per kilo, and it was done in a few hours.

And then there's China. :)

I still think staying in a Holiday Inn Express somewhere along your trip is a good solution. Not sure they all have self-serve laundry, but I've done it in several of their Chinese locations. Not my favorite hotel otherwise, but they're more than decent, and if you need to do laundry, they're great!

Last time I was in Shanghai, I stayed at the Grand Mercure Hongqiao. Not my favorite location (a little too far west for my taste), but my room actually had its own washing machine! No dryer, though, so we had to hang our laundry on the AC vents to dry. A bit odd, but it worked.

Outside the expensive neighbourhoods it is pretty cheap. 1 rmb for socks. 2-4 rmb for shirts. The key is to look for the small mum and pop dry cleaners. That clean everything in their apartment and air dry the clothes. They usually are dirty cheap.

And delivery time 3-4 days or even more?

Sink was fine for underwear and socks. Local dry cleaner was getting 25 rmb for shirts, 35 rmb for shorts. Sheraton matched pricing but nothing like cheap per kilo charges in S. America and SE Asia. Haven't seen laundromats like EU or US anywhere. Guess we were surprised that most chinese can afford washers and dryers but things here change fast. t-shirts are cheap but you can't be bigger than a US large. I'm a big guy so the biggest shirts are too small. Probably ok if you're under 5'10" and under 200 lbs. Sound abt right moondog?

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

Stay in some serviced apartment and do it yourself

Next day usually. They usually don't have room to hold too many clothes so they get upset if you don't pick it up once it is ready. They wash your clothes with other people's so... Mostly used by Chinese locals.

How's their quality control? (The fancy laundry places near me are pretty good at losing stuff, so I loathe to imagine the fate of my socks in the company hundreds of their peers from other owners.)

Check around your local university campus—at least when I was studying there a few years ago, there were two laundry places on the Beida campus that charged by the kilo and had next day service. It was dirt cheap—unless my memory is failing me, the fee was something like 20RMB per kg.

Never had any problems with items getting lost. The only issue was that they identified owners by stapling little plastic-coated paper bits to everything, which sometimes left holes... usually they attached these to the washing instructions tag, which wasn't a problem, but occasionally they missed. :(

Very good. They tag everything and it helps that I have foreign style socks. :D

Unfortunately, laundry-by-the-kilo services are quite uncommon in China.
Strategies to reduce laundry costs:
1) University districts, though must be prepared to ask around for directions to find by-the-kilo places.
2) Hostels, if you are staying in one, will usually have self-service or cheap services to do it for you.
3) Serviced apartments, if one makes sense for you. Usually these have either in-room machine, or a special self-service laundry for residents.
4) HI Expresses, most of which seem to have a self-service laundry room on a lower floor. Normally tokens required, purchasable at front desk. You must use imagination and discretion on how to make this happen if you are not a guest. :D
5) Smaller cities and towns, or Chinese hotels rather than the international brands. These may not have a by-the-kilo service, but are likely to be much cheaper on a per piece basis. On last Oct-Nov's trip to Sichuan/Yunnan, my very decent Chinese hotel in Kunming charged me RMB 20 for a pair of long pants and RMB 12 per shirt. Which for a one-time service during a 3-week trip, I could stand the RMB 78 total charge. At a fancy big name hotel, would have been at least double that. Similarly, getting laundry done at your hotel in Hohhot is going to be less than your hotel in Beijing.

On trips > 7-10 days in China, I usually plot out my laundry stop for a smaller city where I'll be spending 2 nights. Then give them the pants and outer shirts, while I deal with undies and socks in the sink. Trips of this length or less, I can usually forego until I get home or elsewhere with more user-friendly laundry policies.

Ditto. Thankfully I can leave underwear in a friends condo in Shanghai and use the washer and "dryer" (the balcony). So my large frame is safe.

As it happens, we're planning on staying one night at the Marriott Sandalwood apartments in Beijing. Does anyone know if they have a washer/dryer in the one-bedroom suites?