A travel revolution

Taking a long weekend in Beijing, a sprawling city of 20 million people, is no mean feat. Trying to pack the nearby Great Wall and Summer Palace into three days is an even tougher call since nobody speaks English, not even the taxi drivers. The only way to get around is to communicate with hand-written addresses provided by your hotel, leaving little room for spontaneity. Fortunately, I had a secret weapon, a personal assistant provided by At Your Side, a tour guide, interpreter, history teacher and PA, rolled into one. Her name was Zoe and she was born, bred and educated in Beijing.

Zoe knew my partner Javier was after clothes so we headed straight to the fabric market to get him measured up for some trousers. She had recommended he pack his favourite pair so that they could simply copy them but she left it to us to barter with the tailors, even though they spoke very little English. 'It's all part of the experience,' she said. Half an hour later he had ordered three pairs in different colours and was instructed to come back in 24 hours for a fitting.

We headed on to Tiananmen Square where tour groups from all over China had descended. The square is about the size of Green Park but it was packed with crowds. I asked Zoe if this was due to a national festival of some kind but she said it was like this every day. Beijing's tourists are largely Chinese and everywhere we looked there were guides waving coloured flags at their charges. One group was identifiable thanks to everyone wearing matching hats in (presumably knock-off) Burberry check.

That night Zoe prepared written instructions for the taxi drivers for us and we found ourselves at a restaurant on a tourist-free street festooned with red lanterns. The menu was full of photographs so we didn't struggle with the ordering. Only one dish got lost in translation - what we had thought would be scallops turned out to be diced abalone, which had a similar texture but a blander flavour. The crispy Peking duck and pancakes, deftly carved at the table by the chef, made up for it.

On Saturday morning we headed for the Great Wall. There are three sections to visit from Beijing, the closest is just 45 minutes away but is also the most crowded. Zoe took us instead to a section an hour and 45 minutes drive away but with a better chance of missing the crowds. At the top of a rickety chairlift, we turned right and started to climb up a steep section of the wall. An army platoon in green and red uniforms quickly overtook us, powering up the stone steps at twice our speed. The wall snakes along ridges and occasionally forks so that there's a double defence line, which successfully confused marauding Mongolians as they came down from the north. Every 100 metres or so is a tower. Thick black smoke signals made from burning wolf excrement enabled communication along the wall.

On the drive back to the city we stopped at a footbridge over a busy multi-laned road from where we had an uninterrupted view of the Bird's Nest stadium designed by Ai Weiwei and the Swiss architects of the Tate Modern, Herzog and de Meuron, for the Beijing Olympics. Its impressive wiry steel frame, at once sturdy and fragile, dwarfs the bulbous aquatic centre next door.

We had a dim sum lunch in the Peninsula's restaurant - shui mai prawn dumplings and sea bass with noodles - before heading to the rooftop pool for a rest and a visit to the spa. Later we decamped to the top of the Park Hyatt tower for dinner at the China Grill which looks over the new Rem Koolhas CCTV building, a cube with a hole in the centre and behind that, the 330m China World Tower. After a mixed grill and a couple of gin and tonics, we headed to the Philippe Starck-designed LAN club, the city's equivalent of his Sanderson hotel in London. Inside, ex-pats and local high rollers in white blazers ordered spirits by the bottle while Beijing's answer to the Black Eyed Peas covered Rihanna and Justin Bieber's greatest hits.

Sunday morning we spent in the vast complex of the Forbidden City, home to the emperor and his many, many concubines, each of whom had her own lavish apartments. The emperor would never walk through the sprawling palace with its high red walls and interlocking courtyards; he was carried on a sedan chair (I couldn't help thinking that wasn't a bad idea as my weary legs carried me through yet another courtyard and into another vast audience chamber). Meanwhile, the concubines busied themselves with gentle pursuits such as sewing as they waited for the emperor to summon them to his bed. Some might visit the imperial bed only once, never rising up the hierarchy. It didn't matter. Once inside, they would never leave the city again.

Our final visit was to the Summer Palace, where the rulers retired in the hotter months. Now a world heritage site, it looks over a vast manmade lake, with pagodas, pavilions and a marble boat the size of a house. The Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler of the Manchu Qing Dynasty from 1861 until her death in 1908, was a particular fan of this Xanadu. As we took a boat across the lake, I imagined her sitting on the bank with her councillors, drunk on power and plotting her next move.

We were sad to leave again so quickly but At Your Side had assured us the flight back would be a nice surprise. They had booked us on a double-decker Lufthansa A380 plane, brand new and extremely roomy - the washrooms were downstairs. On paper, a three-day city break in China sounds mad, but it's not if you have your trusty tour guide with you.

(atyourside.com; lufthansa.com)