West Lake of Hangzhou

'You shui shou,' nudges the Chinese lad to his mate. Our sampan ferryman rows on stoically, unamused, his broad weather-beaten face focused on his task. I peer through the freezing fog at the ripples that skim the grey surface of the lake – hardly the sort to portend the stirring of some great creature of the deep. These schoolboy pranks…

It is colder than I expected, in the rickety sampan in the middle of the lake. The small table in front of me is covered with a lace cloth patterned with an apple and a pear and outlandishly outsized strawberries. I could do with a steaming cup of tea, but all there is is a glass of water with a yellowing cigarette extinguished in it.

Somewhere ahead of us, just discernible through the mist, is an artificial island with three pools for mirroring the moon.

一湖、二峰、三泉、四寺、五山
One lake, two peaks, three springs, four temples, five mountains
六园、七洞、八墓、九溪、十景
Six gardens, seven caves, eight tombs, nine streams, ten views

So the saying goes.

Where do the three pools come in, apart from being one of the ten celebrated views of the West Lake?

Or the pot-bellied pagodas, for that matter, that have now heaved into view: squat little things on the surface of the water – each one as round as, well, the moon. In the mid-autumn, they would light candles in the pagodas and hide them behind screens. The glow through the circular windows would reflect on still waters, creating the impression of a sea of floating moons dancing amidst the reflection of the harvest moon.

Tailing Tomb

For a moment, all is silent but for the distant barking of a pack of dogs. Before me, the yellow roof of the long'en hall must once have gleamed in newness, but now lies lustreless, cracked and crumbling like the paving stones beneath my feet.

The courtyard with the grey stone altar is surrounded by a stand of darkling pines. Two sentinel hou sit stricken on their lonely plinths, their heavenward gaze obscured by moss and lichen. Behind me, the old memorial tower to the Yongzheng Emperor rises into a hazy sky, its central plaque bare but for the ghost of a Chinese character, the painted wood faded and flaked.

All around is decay and desolation, as perhaps befits a funerary monument.

Then the wind lifts again, carrying the chatter of the few tourists at the site. The sun, soft and watery, begins its long decline, lengthening the shadows that steal around the souvenir vendor as she dozes in her chair.

Fujian Tulou: Chengqilou

'Come,' she nods.

I follow as she mounts the stairs, one little old lady step at a time, keeping pace with her in an attempt to be companionable until she waves me on ahead. I wait for her on the landing as she toils upwards in her pink granny blouse: her hair lank and silver, her skin weatherworn and wrinkled. I imagine the life she must have led, the things she must have seen – but to broach any of that would have been tactless. An intrusion. Anyway my command of Chinese isn't up to it.

'Look,' she says, as she catches me up on the second floor. And there, beneath us, like a miniature walled city within a walled city, lies the coiled core of the Chengqilou (pictured above).

Fujian Tulou: Zhenchenglou

'That's a grandmother banyan,' says my guide Yue'er, pointing at an ancient-looking tree across the road. We have just emerged from sampling some rice wine at a local brewery, and I wonder if the booze has gone to her head. 'Grandfather banyans have a beard,' she sniggers, making a gesture which I hope is intended to refer to adventitious roots.

I have come to rural southern China to explore the tulou: these vast, rammed earth structures that dot the Fujian countryside. The tulou provided accommodation for several generations of a family, but also served a defensive purpose: in lawless times, when armed bandits prowled the hilly countryside, they were a walled fastness with a food store and a water supply. The Zhenchenglou (pictured above), which we visited earlier in the afternoon, is perhaps a good example of tulou architecture: its stout, four-storey defensive wall encircling a communal courtyard with an ancestral hall. Looking up as you step across the threshold, your gaze alights on a host of wooden doors, behind each of which would once have been a dwelling for a separate household: with 44 rooms and two halls on each of the upper two floors, there can't have been much space or privacy. (The lower two floors were used for storage.) Brick partition walls divide the entire structure into eighths, based on the bagua principles of Taoist cosmology: fengshui is important here – although that didn't prevent part of the tulou from burning down.

That evening, I spend the night at the Changdi Inn in the Fuyulou – a rather handsome old house named (in typical Oriental fashion) for 'abundant prosperity'. Built by three brothers, the story goes that the youngest lived in the middle, flanked and protected by the elder two. The owner, a Mr Lin (who also went by the name of Stephen), gave me a quick tour of the premises before dinner. As we paused by a courtyard, he mentioned that they used to bury the afterbirth in the house, to root the children there. These were clearly not a people who wandered far; or perhaps they did, hence the maternal urge to seek to keep them near – I couldn't quite tell. The building hasn't been comprehensively modernised: there is electricity and running water, but the plumbing leaves something to be desired. Still, I am not displeased with the antique four poster bed in my room, although the mattress is a little threadbare and the window is covered by a mesh screen to keep the mosquitoes out, obstructing the view.

11th Harbin Ice and Snow World

Mid-afternoon, and the light begins to leach from the landscape.
We are sat in the middle of an empty car park, awaiting the descent of darkness.

'Cold?' asks 'Brother' Tang, my driver.
I smile feebly and stuff my hands deeper into the pockets of my overcoat, while Lin, my guide, huddles into her red puffer jacket. 'I'm marrying a southerner and moving somewhere warm,' she sighs. Tang laughs the laugh of a man built to keep out the cold. He turns up the heating in the car, but it's -28°C outside and the Manchurian winter seeps in insidiously.

An old Chinese air comes on the radio. 'Xu XiaoFeng,' says Tang, and I nod as if I'd heard the name before. He begins to hum tunelessly along. I imagine the man being the bane of the karaoke halls of Harbin, but he was a good sport. Perhaps his singing got better after a few beers; perhaps after a few beers, no-one cared.
'Do you sing?' he asks Lin, when the music ends.
'Yes,' she says softly.
'Sing us something, then.'
'No.'
'Hah! So you can't sing!'
'Well, that's where you're wrong.'
'What sort of songs do you like?'
Lin shrugs. 'Quiet songs,' she says, at length. 'Sad songs...'
And she turns to stare wistfully out the window.

Four in the afternoon. The car park has filled up with coaches, and it's dark enough to venture out to the Ice and Snow World. The wind scours my cheeks raw during the short walk to the entrance, but inside the towering ice gateway is an extraordinary winter wonderland of ice temples and palaces and pagodas, lit up in festive lights.
'Take your time to wander round,' says Lin, looking miserable in the cold.
'I won't be long,' I reply. 'When does it close?'
'When it melts.'
And with a shrug she was gone, retreating to the warmth of a little indoor auditorium.

Hong Kong Hiatus

Where were you when President Obama was sworn in?

I was transiting through Hong Kong, en route to a business meeting in Japan.

There is not a lot that can be achieved on a three-hour stopover in Hong Kong, particularly at half past six in the morning. I had my heart set on a dim sum breakfast, and decided to venture into Kowloon - 'nine dragons', an evocative name - about a 20-minute train-ride away on the Airport Express. Hong Kong is not a city I am familiar with, but my abiding impression has always been of a place of dense, entangled alley-ways and bustling backstreets, and an air quickened with clamourous Cantonese chatter mingled with billowing aromas from stacks of bamboo steamers... a place of frenzied, frenetic activity.

Sat in the silence of an empty carriage - away from the Antipodean surfers and young American families - I was instead to find a city barely rousing from its slumber. The route of the Airport Express sweeps across various islands and expanses of water, before falling into line alongside the Rambler Channel and the vast container terminals - eerily still in the morning light. I can remember when container operations were a 24/7 business... another alarming sign of these recessionary times?

Alighting at Kowloon station, I find myself in the hollow heart of a shopping mall, before surfacing into a modern square surrounded by towers of glass and steel. I round a corner and encounter a group of little old ladies practising tai-chi. It's about a quarter past seven in the morning, and there's no sign of anywhere to eat...

Just as well they'll feed me on the connecting flight!

Guangzhou Mosque

There is a little mosque in Guangzhou.

Uncertain of what to do with myself with an unexpected extra day in the city, I decide to seek it out, and find it along a road named for a radiant pagoda, built in classical Chinese style but surmounted with a crescent.

A number of Uighur enterprises have sprung up protectively arround it, including a Uighur canteen opposite its main entrance. It is here that I choose to end my journey, in this place with its pale women wrapped in headscarves and its weather-beaten men, and an air thick with Turkic consonants and the promise of another trip - some other time, insh'allah - into the heart of Central Asia...

They are wary of me at first. I look too Han, my sweaty clothes too western. I am the only diner. They address me in startlingly fluent Mandarin. I order a large bowl of spicy mutton noodle soup, a chicken kebab, a large flat bread and a pot of tea - all for little more than the price of a latte at the Starbucks on Shamian Dao.

Halfway through my meal, a couple of old men appear, faces taut under gleaming white skullcaps. They sit for a while, eyeing me up, then come over to sit with me. One of them helps himself to a cup of tea from my pot.
'Are you Muslim?' he asks me in Mandarin.
'No,' I reply, somewhat sorry to disappoint.
'We are,' he says, gesturing at the mosque.
'I know.'
'What is your faith?'
I shrug my shoulders non-committally.
'Would you like to make a donation?'
'For the mosque?'
The man launches into a well-rehearsed spiel that I don't understand, although I catch what I fancy are snippets of Arabic: 'juma', 'salat' - or perhaps 'zakat'.

I suddenly feel a strange urge to be part, in some small way, of this little community of exiles, far - so very far - away from their sprawling steppe and desert homeland. I slip the old man a few small notes, uncertain if the mosque administration would ever see a yuan, and he reaches over unexpectedly to clasp my hands. 'Bismillah!' he exclaims, and he and his companion bustle out.

I stumble out not long after, sated, dredging my memory for faded fragments of Turkish. 'Teşşekür,' I murmur at the staff, hoping I've managed to get it right, and disappear into the sticky afternoon.

Sunrise on the Yangtze

Dawn breaks, blue and misty, on the Yangtze River.

I wander out on deck into the chill morning air, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fleet shadows of wizened oarsmen and the twinkling lanterns of cormorant fishermen on the old river. Instead, I catch a whiff of diesel as we pass an enormous, coal-laden barge. The old ways are going, or have long since gone…

I am not alone on deck. Next to me, a bent, elderly couple reminisce in low voices about a trip to Guilin. Further along, a group of swarthy men with brutish faces huddle in a corner, shoulders squared against the breeze, smoking and ever so often hawking and spitting ostentatiously into the river.

We arrive at Wushan shortly after daybreak, and transfer to a series of smaller ferries for our excursion to the Lesser Three Gorges. The crowds – mostly domestic tourists – are rowdy and excitable. A vendor passes through the cabin, selling roast 'mountain hens' – were they pigeons, I wonder? – splayed, skewered, and stacked high on a large silver dish. Evidently a crowd-pleaser, the vendor does a brisk trade, and the cabin is soon crunching its way through the little birds, tossing bones and scraps nonchalantly out the windows to the swirling waters below.

Suzhou Gardens

In my mind's eye, I am already there, away from the boisterous bustle of the train station in Shanghai, and in the midst of the serene gardens of Suzhou...

I imagine them luminous with the fresh green foliage of spring; drooping willows, blazing red peonies, jade-green carp ponds glinting with gold and silver fins - everywhere a harmony of earth and air, and wind and water. And, amidst the rockeries and low bridges, halls and pavilions with enchanting names: here the 'Hall of Distant Fragrance', there the 'House of Sweet-Smelling Rice'; in a solitary corner, the 'Listening to the Sound of Rain Pavilion' and the 'Room for Sighing in the Cloud'; and in another sequestered space, the 'With Whom Shall I Sit Pavilion', filled with the langorous sighs of little maidens in the flush of first love...

As it turns out when I get there, the gardens are delightful, but any hopes of quiet contemplation are quickly dashed by the crowds of chattering domestic tourists and their bellowing guides.

Dumpling Diversion

'Hello passenger! Welcome to Take-My-Taxi!' chirruped the meter, as the taxi driver spat lazily out the window.

It is another smoggy Shanghai morning. Unable to muster up an appetite for the hotel breakfast of greasy scrambled eggs and dishwater coffee, I head out in search of an authentic dumpling house instead, and find the Nanxiang Mantou Restaurant by the Mid-Lake Pavillion in the old town.

There is an art to tucking into a steamed dumpling.
I learn the hard way, for example, that you do not pop one whole directly from the steamer into your mouth, or you will scald your tongue on the boiling juices and cause your eyes to water.
Nor do you attempt to release the boiling juices by prodding a hole in the dumplings with your chopstick, as you will end up squirting the juices down your shirt.
Finally, unless you are a seasoned pro able to scoff your meal down without committing any of the above faux pas, you would do best not to sit under the bewildered and disapproving gaze of a fat but supercilious Shanghainese couple while you tuck in.

Beat the scrambled eggs, though!