China is no place for solitude. From the moment the British Airways Jumbo landed in Beijing (Peking) less than 10 hours after leaving Heathrow, I was surrounded by more than a fifth of the world’s population. You’re always rubbing shoulders with an increasingly open and active population. Pause anywhere for one minute and fresh-eyed students will ask to practise their English on you, or to pose with you as a friend takes a picture.

Tiananmen Square — the largest urban square in the world — is now a cacophony of colourfully clad school children, skipping past the 80,000 a day queue shuffling forward to Mao’s mausoleum.

Along one side of the square is the entrance to the Forbidden City, where I relived scenes from The Last Emperor. The once ubiquitous men dressed in drab blue Mao suits are now relegated to wizened figures squatting on temple steps.

In their place, smart suits, designer denims and short, tight skirts stride confidently through the sea of bicycles. Girls play Game Boy outside Macdonalds, couples hold hands in public and people speak more openly about the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square “incident”. Even soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army smile for pictures in their slightly over-sized uniforms.

Since China’s open door policy was launched in 1978-9 the economy has taken off but, in the 30 or more cities of more than one million people, it has brought more congestion and higher crime rates.

Thanks to jet lag it was no hardship to rise early next morning to watch both young and old in the park, engrossed in taiji (taichi or shadow boxing) and gingong (spirit-cleansing breathing exercises).

Just one and a half hours from Beijing is one section of the Great Wall — the only man-made object that can be seen from the moon with the naked eye. Locals describe the Wall as a 3700 mile long stone dragon with its head on the coast and tail in the Gobi desert. I found food in China an adventure. If you go out for duck in Peking you can expect to be offered bits of the bird you had thought inedible, including webbed feet in mustard. It’s considered rude not to try at least a little of each dish. Slightly more appetising is a Mongolian Hot Pot. You dip slivers of pork and beef, noodles and spinach-like greens into boiling water while gnawing on a sesame seed bun. At a celebratory meal beware of Maotai. It’s a fiery, 160 per cent proof liquor made from sorghum grain. Your host may try to toast you under the table.

I ended the evening by subjecting myself to Chinese Opera — a visual and aural experience everyone should try once. But, unless your eardrums are well-insured, a half hour sample is preferable to a three hour marathon.

It was time to escape the bustle of Beijing and take to the water. From a boat I could dip into the ebb and flow of China without getting too submerged in the rising tide of humanity — currently more than 1.2 million people.
I began my nautical ramblings in Beijing’s port of Tianjin. First stop was Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula. This is China’s northernmost port, lying just across the bay from North Korea. Although the town sees few foreign tourists, the cruise ships are invariably greeted by bands of local school children in colourful costumes clanging, banging, waving and singing. When Dalian was under Japanese rule at the beginning of this century, it became the headquarters of the South Manchurai Railway. It remains a major rail centre and good place to view coal-fired locomotives.

After sailing through the night we reached Nanjing on the southern banks of the Yangtze River, 200 miles from its mouth. This former Chinese capital is where Dr Sun Yatsen was elected President of the Republic in 1912, and it’s here that his spectacular mausoleum is perched at the top of a flight of 392 steps. Nanjing’s 20-mile long, 14th century city wall is the longest in the world and the five million population are outnumbered 10 to one by trees.

From the mountains of Tibet to the South China Sea, the 4000 mile Yangtze River slashed a huge physical and psychological divide, separating the bureaucratic North from the commercial South. Also called Changjiang — the Great River — or, imaginatively, the Long River, the Yangtze is the world’s third longest river behind the Amazon and the Nile. It drains an area 10 times the size of England, and floods on average once a decade. Despite its elaborate dykes and defences more than 2300 people died when it flooded in June 1991.

I took a side trip along the Grand Canal — China’s second greatest engineering feat. It was built in the 7th Century to transport grain from the fertile Yangtze and West Basins, which grow nearly half of China’s rice, to the less fertile north.

In its final 1000 miles the Yangtze falls just 100 feet. Here it is wide and sluggish. A working river busy with family traders and gangs of fishermen, the paddy-fringed banks are punctuated with the occasional belching power station or clanking dockyard.

I watched small tugs chug inexorably up and down pulling necklaces of heavily laden barges in endless prayer to trade. These workhorse houseboats were draped with assorted washing strung over plant pots, pans, anonymous crates and bicycles held on with hemp. Two flapping shirts parted to reveal a toothless smile inviting me to stretch across the gap between our two cultures.

We turned up the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, and headed towards the largest city on the Asian continent. As dawn prized its way through the recalcitrant mist, an urbanisation six times the size of greater Los Angeles slowly enveloped us.

We glided passed ancient barques clinging to crumbling warehouses where flocks of metallic cranes waited to plunder their next cargo. Through liquid light came waves of clinking and throbbing, more cranes, more rusting barges and more warehouses, now with taller buildings towering over them out of the gloom.

We were being swallowed up by Shanghai, the hub of China’s industry, commerce, cultural and political thought. Its 13 million people fill the streets, and new subways, bridges and tunnels cannot keep pace with the growth.

It was time to get back in the melee, surrounded by more than 20 per cent of the world’s population.