The Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses didn’t seem an appropriate place to find a gold plaque issued by The Guinness Book of Records. This prosaic piece of 20th century gimmickry detracted from the serene and timeless ambience of the monastery. Nevertheless, it attested to the fact that the giant lineage of the Maitreya Buddha had been carved out of a single white sandalwood tree 26 metres high.

The Pavilion is one of five richly decorated halls in Beijing’s Lama Temple, known in Chinese as the “Palace of Peace and Harmony”. Bright red painted columns supported gently curving roofs of glazed yellow tiles above eaves of brilliantly painted gold, green and blue designs.

Inside the halls, resplendent with frescoes and statues, red and gold lacquered altars displayed offerings of cakes alongside flickering oil lamps in small lotus-shaped bowls. In a corner, a brown robed monk nodded off while a guard strolled around ensuring that “religion was respected”, as a sign at the entranceway instructs visitors to do. In quiet courtyards shaded by pine trees and clumps of bamboo, worshippers placed smoking joss sticks into bronze urns watched over by sacred animals.

I was continually impressed by the magnificence and richness of the decorations at Beijing’s major historical complexes such as the overwhelming Forbidden City and the splendid Summer Palace. The vastness of scale of these and other sights like Tiananmen Square and indeed, of Beijing itself, takes some getting used to, especially when walking. City blocks seem interminably long, distances between bus stops are lengthy, wide roads stretch straight ahead for miles and the Great Wall seems to go on forever.

Despite the distances, we had no difficulty getting around once we’d mastered the bus routes. The subway was easy to use and station names in English ensured we went in the right direction and got off at the correct stop. Small taxis were not expensive.

You’ll find it useful to have a city map with place names in Chinese characters as well as English, so you can ask a stall keeper for directions by pointing out the destination on the map. People were quite amused when we asked for help. This method failed only once when we were searching for the pavilions and gardens of Prince Gong’s Residence near the Shisha Hai Lakes.

We spent a couple of hours traipsing around side streets and laneways, past corner shops and ice-cream sellers, resting for drinks, watching elderly men animatedly playing cards or smiling at school children on their way home until eventually we found the high brick wall surrounding the mansion, not far from where we had started. I don’t rate Prince Gong’s place very high on the list of priorities, but if you go, take a taxi or ask someone where it is.

When we were making feeble attempts in fractured Chinese to buy admission tickets to Beihai Park, we were helped by an English-speaking girl who turned out to be an ethnic Chinese born in Cambodia. She said her family moved to France when she was young and she had come to Beijing to study Mandarin. She was not finding the language easy, something we could sympathise with.

Our lack of Chinese didn’t greatly inhibit us when it came to food. We preferred to eat at small restaurants without an English menu and would point to “shredded pork and green peppers” or “spicy hot chicken and peanuts” in our phrase book and see what arrived, taking care not to point to “dog meat” and “snake”.

Street stalls are cheap and you can see straight away what’s on offer and point to whatever takes your fancy. On these occasions, though, it’s best to go for something you’re sure has been freshly fried. The popularity of these stalls ensures a quick turnover, so it is unlikely the food has been standing around for long.

Across the road from Beijing Zoo there is a row of food stalls that we often passed on the way from our hotel to the subway station. Cheery girls in white coats and caps smilingly encouraged us to eat by pointing to large enamel bowls piled high with noodles and vegetables or mounds of bamboo steamers full of dumplings.

On other meanderings around back streets we stopped for drinks at tiny family run cafes with only two or three tables. Grandmother, daughter and even small grandchildren tried hard to please while explaining with charade-like antics what they could offer. They were so eager to help we were sorry we weren’t ready for a meal, as the experiences would have been worth it.

One of our favourite street-side snacks was delicious yoghurt which comes in a small bottle and is runny enough to drink with a straw. When it comes to Beijing duck, this city is the best place to try it and you’ll find this speciality served in many restaurants. Don’t feel intimidated if you don’t speak Chinese, but if you would be more comfortable in familiar surroundings, head for the Australia Kebab Restaurant. I didn’t go there, but noticed its green and gold facade opposite the south-west corner of Tiananmen Square.

I thought the Japanese were the world’s most prolific photographers, but the Chinese must run a very close second. There they were in front of Mao’s portrait, posing in the Great Hall of the People, dwarfed by the giraffes at the zoo, and on the Great Wall wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with “I Climbed the Great Wall”.

They were in tour groups, family groups, or girlfriend/boyfriend duos being snapped from all angles, even in imperial fancy dress they hired at the Forbidden City. They really don’t care who is in their photos, as long as they finish the film on their outing. One beaming man even got me posing with his wife and mother-in-law on the Great Wall, but without the sweatshirt.

A word of warning for smokers. In May, smoking in public places was banned. A female English tourist we met was very indignant at being fined about 40p for smoking in the street.

Beijing is a terrific city so try and stay long enough to do it, and its food, justice. But don’t leave your chopsticks standing upright in the rice dish. This is very offensive to Chinese who see it as a sign of death because it looks like incense sticks in a bowl of ashes.

China’s capital city, Beijing, is a classic mix of history. From the imperial Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City to Mao’s Masouleum it is a fascinating gateway to this massive country. But, as Andrew discovered, it can also be a massive culture shock.

The hotel karaoke bar in the next room was having a special Sing-it-with-Phlegm session. Through the rice-paper walls came a jarring mix of canned music, the occasional feedback whine, a few embarrassed microphone giggles and a Red Army of throat clearers: “I am hhhwww-oman, here me hhhwww-oar.” A traditional Beijing tune.

The encore was performed in the hallway outside my hotel room. The walk from the bar to the toilet — directly against the other side of my room — was at least a three-spit journey. Saliva hit the floor with machine-gun rapidity and I imagined globules of gob trickling under my door. When I stepped out for my own toilet stop, the concrete was so sticky underfoot it was like walking across dozens of discarded chewing-gum sticks.

The toilet was the traditional and beloved Asian squat. Catch a train in China and you’ll find footprints on the toilet seat from where the locals have climbed up to squat.

Watch the Chinese relaxing in the street, squatting down as though sitting on their ankles, and you very quickly realise they are born to squat. As a beginner, squatting over a toilet is one of life’s more unpleasant events. It requires a mastery of body positioning and thigh strength that takes time to develop. Your legs complain and threaten to cramp, and sometimes you are forced to stand midway through your performance just to give them a rest. There’s also the small squatting matter of your trousers, which hang in a dangerous “catching” position.

I hadn’t the time or the will to develop my squatting skills, so every night I headed to McDonald’s to queue up with all the other Westerners waiting to use the porcelain bowl toilets.

I discovered these quirks of China before I had even stepped from my hotel. Squirrelled away in a typical Beijing back-street warren, it was the kind of setting where the simplest of minds could imagine Triad gangs in their element, and where pig trotters and chicken feet hanged from market stalls in devilish mockery of a visitor’s initial nervousness.

Weaving through these alleys for long enough, I found myself at Tiananmen Square, the hub of Beijing.

The world has seen it crawling with tanks and protesters, but it is more usual to find it full of toddlers flying kites high into the polluted air. The kites evoked such a nostalgic sense of childhood, that I bought one off my local tout. It was eagle shaped, sleek and conquering, the kind that dominated the air-space above Chairman Mao’s Mausoleum in the middle of Tiananmen Square.

I nursed that kite like it was a new-born child, carried it through three border crossings and threatened to hurt anyone who so much as breathed on it.

I flew it in a local park the day I arrived in London. It rose for a second, stirring up memories of Dad’s home-made garbage-bag kites, then it nosedived like a buzzard after a mouse, crashing heavily. One wing snapped off. Another tourist, another sucker.

The striking thing about the really young children, as they watched their own obviously sturdier kites, was their trousers. Every one of them had a split in the back. Was this an epidemic of big-bummed Beijing babies?

It became clearer when I saw a proud father pick up his child and cradle him into the low squatting position I was trying my best to avoid. This was toilet training made quick. Just point and shoot.

Meal times in Beijing were an experiment in random selection. English menus seemed not to exist in my little piece of the city, so I found myself pointing to lines of particularly appetising Chinese script and hoping for good old steak in black bean sauce. As I waited one lunch time, the man at the next table leaned over and spat on the floor next to my feet. How nice of him to make me a finger bowl.

My meal arrived, a plateful of anaemic meat pieces sprinkled with chilli bits. Imagine the texture of a calamari sponge cake and you might appreciate my discomfort. As my teeth squelched through the meal, I vowed never again to eat calamari or sponge cake.

Like all Beijing tourists, I took a day away from the smog to visit the Great Wall. It was just as the name implies, great. Imagine the world’s largest picture frame, have it designed by Salvador Dali, and you have created the Great Wall as it darts along the tops of every hill in the region.

Guidebooks will tell you it’s simple to get to the Wall yourself, but that’s only if you have a degree in reading Chinese train timetables. The script looked more like sandpaper scratches to me, so I eventually succumbed to one of those infernal tours where you sign on to see one thing and get taken to half-a-dozen others so the bus driver gets his kick-back. We sipped tea, ate real pretend Chinese food (steak and black bean at last) and visited a pearl factory for oysters on steroids.

“If you can guess how many pearls are in this oyster, I will give you a pearl,” the factory manager told our group One, three, two, five, four —nobody guessed correctly. Meanwhile, I was thinking there must be a hell of a lot of pearls in that oyster or he wouldn’t be risking such a prize. So I guessed 23. The manager changed the subject and never did tell us how many, so I’m still guessing 23.

Waiting at the train station the next day, as I prepared to leave Beijing, I decided to give the local chow one last try. 

I headed upstairs to the station cafe, relieved to discover the food laid out in a glass display unit. Potatoes, I decided, pointing to the potato dish. Good old safety-first potatoes.

I sat down and the cafe stopped dead, all eyes cast in my direction. I was a greater curiosity than Pamela Anderson at a bra-burning demonstration. Casually I took my first bite.

The food squelched familiarly between my teeth. This wasn’t potato at all. It was my old friend, calamari sponge cake.