IT ALL sounded so infinitely promising. Three weeks in Inner Mongolia and Tibet, watching someone else working. The someone in this case being my photographer friend Basil Pao, and the work, his forthcoming book on China, which involves covering the third-largest country in the world with his camera in a little over a year.

Only a week before leaving to meet up with him in Hong Kong I contract a fierce, persistent, phlegmatic cough.

To the Greeks, phlegm was one of the four humours, bodily fluids which defined a certain physical and mental condition; it represented inertia and indifference. This was not the right frame of mind for the journey ahead, so before boarding my flight to Hong Kong I arm myself with an arsenal of linctuses, antibiotics, inhalants, soothing oils and a bottle of Ivy and Thyme Complex (highly recommended by a neighbour from Sri Lanka) which I hope will deliver a knockout punch to whatever is lurking within.

An attentive Chinese steward makes me welcome, offers me a blanket and settles me down with the soft-spoken injunction: "Have a good fright, Mr Palin."

Thanks to a judicious mix of amoxycillin and Australian Shiraz, I do.

Teeming rain and wind, caused by the tail end of a typhoon, buffets the plane as we descend into Hong Kong.

They take it all in their stride here. On a page headed "In Case Of Typhoon" my hotel directory explains a signal system which advises guests what precautions to take depending on the severity of a storm. In the event of a Signal 10, the highest alert, guests are warned to ring and make restaurant reservations as soon as possible.

Basil meets me and, grabbing umbrellas, we set off to what he promises me is the best noodle bar in the world. As we struggle up the steep lanes behind the hotel the rain is coming down hard and straight, the way it seems to do only in films. I'm sure this will help the cough.

The Michelin triple rosette of noodle shops is Mak's, a small and unpretentious Formica-lined room on Stanley Street. It's been here for years and Basil, who used to live in Hong Kong, loves its functional working atmosphere. After a bowl of the world's best egg noodles we stop, by way of contrast, at a wine bar a few doors up, all dim lighting, self-consciously modern decor and European women taking tapas.

Basil is soon restless.

"Like some sushi?"

I nod, drain my glass of Sardinian vermentino, and dive out into the rain. We press on, getting soggier and soggier, resisting the temptations of an Irish pub and the blandishments of a rosy-cheeked girl in full national dress who tries hard to interest us in a Hungarian goulash. At last, behind a bead curtain, is a doorway leading into a tiny, family-run sushi bar.

Quiet husband prepares the fish, sociable wife takes the orders. Every now and then the door is flung open and the howling wind and rain throws in another diner. Madame greets each one with a cry of admiration as if they've just climbed Everest.

We end up discussing that perennial Hong Kong topic, food scares. The latest concerns the use of a toxic chemical called malachite green used locally in treating fungal infections on eels. Madame assures us, proudly, that her eels are flown in daily from Japan.

I should be seriously jet-lagged but the energy of the city is infectious. Hong Kong embodies all the best instincts of the traveller - outward looking, opportunistic, tolerant and curious. There can be few islands less insular than the one we are on now. Its harbours and waterfronts service ships from every country, its hills have been bridged and tunnelled to bring goods and passengers into the shining new airport. It's a city with the rest of the world constantly on its mind.

Eighteen hours later Hong Kong slips out of sight as our plane to Beijing bumps and grinds up through the rain clouds. Giving the lie to my thoughts on insularity, the lead story in The South China Morning Post is defiantly parochial: "We'll Keep Selling Eels, Say Traders".

Though Hong Kong has, since 1997, been a Special Administra- tive Region of China, its inhabitants still regard the mainland as backward, lagging way behind in style, manners, civility and international awareness. They point to the fact that I need a visa to enter China, but not Hong Kong. Certainly my travel documents are more thoroughly scrutinised at Beijing. But the airport is efficient and I've no complaints about the comforts offered by the Beijing Grand. "Once An Imperial Palace, Now A Luxury Hotel." Indeed, it has one touch of luxury I've never encountered before - a single rose petal slowly rotating in the lavatory bowl. It feels all wrong to relieve myself on it, but equally odd to reach in and take it out.

Decide to put off any decision until after supper. Eat with Basil and his producer and the tour organiser Nina Huang Fan, who lives in Beijing and looked after us on the Tibet section of Himalaya. She says that the city is taking the 2008 Olympics very seriously. Citizens are being urged to curb public spitting and taxi companies are issuing their drivers with English language tapes. Public directions are being duplicated in English, though not always successfully. An exhibition area dedicated to the many ethnic minorities of China was signposted as "Racist Park".

The next morning I take a walk alongside a canal which I can see from my window. On either side of it are well laid out gardens, with trees obligingly labelled in Chinese and Latin, so I now know what Juglans regia, Tooma sinensis and Diospyros kaki look like. The path follows an avenue of willows and at intervals there are ornamental stones, which the Chinese like a lot. This pleasant shaded walk meanders gently on until it ends at a wall with a doorway in the corner. I pass through it, to experience a sensation akin to falling off a cliff. It gives directly on to Tiananmen Square.

Intimate corners become colossal spaces. A strolling few becomes a darting, restless, animated multitude. Near silence becomes a cacophony of recorded announcements, PA systems, tour group megaphones, whistles, car horns, grating gears and upraised voices. I have walked out into the very heart of China.

I find myself in front of Tiananmen itself, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, from which Mao Zedong declared the foundation of the Chinese Socialist Republic in 1949. Behind the Gate of Heavenly Peace a series of other giant gates leads to the Forbidden City, believed to have been the centre of the Earth where, for 500 years, the Emperors of Heaven lived, separated from their subjects by the scale of their palaces and the unimaginable size of their fortunes.

The Communists may have dismantled the fortunes but their architects have kept the scale. The massive Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square faces the Museum of the Revolution and the Museum of Chinese History on the east. On the north side Mao's portrait faces the mausoleum where his deep-frozen corpse is on daily public view. And in the middle, strung across the mighty space which shrinks humans to specks, are 16 poles each bearing one of the most simple and powerful national symbols in the world, the red flag.

The monumental horizontals of socialist architecture tempt me less than the gilded, painted roofs of the imperial palaces and I turn my back on the square and join the long lines of people snaking through the pavilions, goggling at the opulence and grandeur of the enormous palace complex. The Forbidden City, as its name suggests, was designed to keep the masses at a decent distance from the Emperor of Heaven, and the fact that it is now a prime tourist destination is a powerful symbol of what has changed in China.

This heaving dense throng poking camcorders and digital cameras into the Holy of Holies would have been an emperor's worst nightmare.

If it's Monday it must be Inner Mongolia. With my chest still rumbling ominously I board the late evening flight to Hailar, about 1,000 (650 miles) northeast of Beijing, and close to the border with Siberia and Mongolia. This is the next stop on Basil's trans-China photo-shoot. The flight is full of excited Chinese tourists. I ask Basil what they, and we, might be going to see up there.

"Grassland," he says airily. "Huge areas of grassland, stretching right across into Russia." I wait expectantly, but he just smiles and puts his headphones back on.

Nor does my guidebook exactly get the pulses racing. "Be sure to study the menu," it warns, "as Hailarites have a taste for dog, judging by the number of canine skeletons hanging about."

Hailar airport is small and appears to have only one trolley, which Basil commandeers, and we steer our bags to a waiting van. The night is jet black and there's little to see but the pale surface of a long straight road picked out by the headlights. Then, without warning, we crest a hill and below us, like the fires of some mighty encampment, is a vision of glittering light. As we drive over the Amur River bridge and head towards the centre of town, it seems that every other building is outlined by neon. Squares quiver with illuminated palm trees and star-burst light clusters. Hailar's message seems unequivocal. Welcome to the party.

The reality is, sadly, a perfectly pleasant box of a room which has a No Smoking sign on the wall, scores of cigarette burns on the carpet and a very hard bed.

By daylight Hailar is revealed as a city of modest size, which looks as if it has been built entirely in the last few weeks. Glass and steel blocks, bland and shiny, line the wide streets. The prevailing style owes more to the Greeks and Romans than it does to tiled roofs and pagodas. Pediments, columns, bays and balustrades are prominently featured, but they seem devoid of any structural significance. This is clip-on architecture.

Inner Mongolia is a vulnerable corner of the Chinese Empire. In the Second World War the invading Japanese made Hailar their forward base, in return for the Soviet troops agreeing not to invade nearby Manchuria. The Russian border lies only a few hours' drive to the west, at the town of Manzhouli.

As we drive I'm hoping to be lulled by therapeutic expanses of empty grassland, my city-clogged lungs cleansed by the pure air of the virgin steppe. But I'd reckoned without the Chinese economic miracle. Even in this comparatively remote corner of the country the two-lane road is being widened into a four-lane highway, and clouds of dust hang in the air from the diggers and graders and bulldozers and trucks grinding their gears as they heave spoil from one site to another. Ribbon development is already springing up and apartment blocks stand out in the middle of treeless pasture like islands in the sea, soon to be joined by factories, power stations and trading estates. Even the farms here look sinister, an impression confirmed when we try to visit one of them, only to be told that it had recently been closed because of an outbreak of "Disease Number Five".

Tourists are being lured here by a number of hotels and camps built around the theme of the Mongolian nomad. On anything resembling a hill with a view, clusters of white concrete yurts have been built, looking like 1950s flying saucers. Here tourists can spend a night and have a "nomad experience".

After a few miles our driver pulls up and points with great excitement. He's spotted something rare - real nomads. Unhurriedly steering a herd of sheep along the grass beside the road are two figures on horseback. An older man wears a nondescript modern coat and hat but the younger one looks like a wizard with a black cloak embroidered with green trim, a pigtail and a conical hat with red-trimmed ear-muffs. As they get closer the wizard turns out to be a woman.

We lunch just east of Manz-houli beside a lake of wind-whipped water called Dalai Hu. A hotel, painted blinding white, has the best position next to the water, but they can't serve us lunch because we aren't with a tour group. Their loss is our gain, as we find a modest single-storey house nearby with door and window frames picked out in fresh blue paint and a row of yellow dahlias fighting the heat outside. It belongs to a local fisherman. Within a matter of minutes we have beers and a plateful of small whiskery shrimps boiled in salt water and pepped up with deep-fried lake-fish, fish roe with green pepper and parsley, fish dumplings and more.

The owner, shirt flapping open over a once-white vest, has a tousle of thick dark hair, skin hardened by the sun and broad Mongolian features. He has lived round the lake for 30 years and has a daughter who works as an Italian translator in Beijing. He nods towards me and asks Basil if I'm Italian. Basil shakes his head and replies that I'm English.

"Oh, well," shrugs the fisherman, "they all look the same."

Good for me. Not so good for the Italians.

Manzhouli is another instant modern city. The Russian influence is strong. There are plenty of them in the streets, towering over the Chinese. Signs are in Russian and Chinese and the shops are full of luxury goods from across the border. The scrubby grass by the side of the road that leads to the frontier is lined with collections of brightly painted Russian dolls made of concrete, and at the border itself there are shops selling, among other things, telescopes, longbows and Putin T-shirts.

I can go as far as a small viewing area, beyond which is a watchtower and a neat sign between me and Siberia which reads, in English, "No Visitors".

At the sound of a world-weary wail I turn to see two locomotives, blackened with diesel oil, appear out of the flat, featureless landscape hauling a half-kilometre rake of empty goods wagons across the border into Russia. This is the trans-Manchurian railway, and expresses run along here between Beijing and Moscow.

Manzhouli, with its mix of Russian banks and duty-free shops and Chinese trade parks and business hotels, embodies the increasingly cordial relationship between two great nations, once divided by opposing brands of Communism, now united by their own brand of capitalism.

My room at the catchily named Man-zhoulishiming- zhu Hotel bears evidence that corners have been cut. As I try to move the single comfortable chair in my room, both of its arms come off in my hand. The lavatory, once flushed, carries on flushing for the rest of the night and a search for lavatory paper proves fruitless. A rap on the door proves to be from an attractive, smiling, probably teenage girl who, in between giggles exchanged with an unseen friend, asks me in good English if I would like a massage. In case I might not know what massage is, she mimes it quite graphically, producing another fit of giggles from someone out in the hallway. I decline as politely as possible but she leaves me her card, in Chinese on one side and Russian on the other, just in case.

We retrace our steps to Hailar next day, taking time on the way to visit a family of "working" nomads living in two yurts not far off the main road. An elderly man and his two daughters greet us. As they are here only from May to October, the sons and husbands are hard at work grazing their 500 sheep and 30 cattle and gathering in the grass to feed their livestock over the winter.

We're offered butter tea and a slice of cheese so hard you could dig with it. The yurts, each about 6m (20ft) in diameter and rising to 2m (7ft) in the centre, are wood-framed and wrapped around with white canvas secured with coloured plastic straps. Inside, what they need hangs on hooks attached to the wooden frame. A torch, a radio, an electric clock, a black bag, a few joints of meat and lumps of dried fat. On a side table there is a small shrine centred on an image of Genghis Khan, a salutary reminder of the powerful Mongolian influence on Chinese history.

The women agree to be photographed and one fetches out a traditional green silk robe with white buttons down the side. As she stands posing I notice that her shoes are modern, of black suede with 3in rubber platform soles.

On our way back to Hailar we're directed to the Jinzhan-gan nomad camps. More tourist yurts and a resident cast of performers who do everything from local dances and songs to horseriding and banquets. A noisy group of visitors is wandering around photographing each other. So preoccupied are they with visual trophies that no one actually seems to be looking at anything.

Nina grimaces. "They're from Shanghai," she whispers with barely concealed disgust.

She brings two fists up against each other. "Beijing and Shanghai are like that."

Beyond the camp the hills rise more steeply and I can at last get a sense of the scale and tranquillity of the grasslands. Without a tree in sight, an unbroken green carpet stretches along the valley below. A river meanders through it in wide lazy loops, slashes of deep black against the yellowing green plain.

Back in Hailar we eat at an attractive, homely little restaurant, distinguished from so many others by its natural wood decor and absence of fluorescent lighting. The style of cooking was developed by the urban intellectuals who, at the time of the Cultural Revolution, were sent out to remote places like this to be "re-educated". This meant hard agricultural labour. To keep morale up they used whatever meagre ingredients they could forage to try to re-create the food they had been used to back home in the big cities. So we eat what amounts to the food of the gulags. Big stews comprising pork or fish with local mushrooms, potatoes and beans mopped up with cornbread. Thick and delicious.

By the time I get to breakfast the next morning, the big tour group, and most of the breakfast, has gone, and there's only me and the cleaners in the capacious dining room of the Beir Hotel. I sip a slightly sour mix of boiled milk and tea and gaze out of the window.

When I first came to China I remember drab cities with Communist slogans across the buildings and Mao suits much in evidence. Now, less than 20 years later, the change that began with Deng Xiaoping's "open door" policy has not just softened but obliterated the hard lines of state socialism. On the buildings, political rallying cries have been replaced by the name of the private developers, portraits of Mao by the faces of David Beckham and Luis Figo. From where I 'm sitting Inner Mongolia could be Essex or Illinois.

Yet China's long and complex history has been characterised by a mistrust of outside influences. This is a nation which has always been aware of its own strength and its own destiny. Chairman Mao tried to obliterate the past, and it could be argued that as a result China is in a state of cultural limbo, which Western style and taste is rushing to fill.

But judging by what I've seen of crowded airports and thriving internal tourism, the Chinese are eager to get to know their own country and regain a sense of their own history. The glittering façade of a boom economy is clear to see. What is going on in hearts and minds is less easy for an outsider to discern, but far more interesting.

On my return to Beijing I seek medical advice for the cough that has refused to go away, and after examinations I'm given the depressing but not unexpected advice that two weeks on the Tibetan plateau was more likely to kill than cure.

It's in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, that I finally part company with Basil and Nina. They fly to Lhasa, I go the other way, back to Hong Kong. By way of a last- night celebration we sample one of the oldest and most historic of the famous tea houses of Chengdu. Bulldozed out of its original location by inexorable urban renewal, the Shun Xing Old Tea House has been lovingly re-created and can now be found in a shopping mall on the second floor of the Chengdu International Exhibition and Convention Centre.

Reconstructed old town streets and alleyways lead through to a convincingly authentic version of the timbered tea room itself. Basil, who rates Sichuan food as the best in China, orders a feast of dim sum, which we polish off while watching the Sichuan Opera, a rather grand name for a live show of assorted variety acts. These include a display of acrobatic tea-pouring, a much-loved magician who has far from mastered the art of concealment, a comedy sequence in which a dominating Sichuan housewife forces her husband to crawl around the stage with a lamp on his head, and, as a dazzling finale, the Face Changing Dance, in which the performers change masks with unbelievable speed and dexterity to portray a succession of gods and monsters.

It is a tradition of these tea-houses that during the show masseurs move among the audience offering a powerful five-minute work-over of back, neck and face. This is followed by an ear-cleaning service provided by a metal wand with a white feather on the end.

I gratefully took advantage of the massage, but passed on the ears. If only they'd offered throat cleaning instead.

Himalaya by Michael Palin is published in paperback by Phoenix (£8.99). See www.palinstravels.co.uk. Basil Pao's book, China Revealed, will be published next October by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

China The Three Emperors Royal Academy of Arts, London W1, from November 12 to April 17, 2006. Open daily 10am-6pm; late nights Friday and Saturday until 10pm. Tickets £11, call 0870 8488484 or book online www.threeemperors.org.uk.

Page 5: how to get on the road to China

If you want to follow in Michael Palin's footsteps, try these specialist travel companies:

Audley Travel (01869 276217, www.audleytravel.com) can organise a trip similar to that undertaken by Michael Palin. For example, it offers a two-week trip taking in Hong Kong, Beijing and Inner Mongolia from £2,195pp including accommodation, breakfasts, Heathrow-Beijing flights with BA, and internal flights in China.

Other China operators include: CTS Horizons (020-7836 9911, www.ctshorizons.com), good for tailor-made tours; Kuoni (01306 747736, www.kuoni.co.uk) offers Hainan stop-overs; Wendy Wu Tours (0870 3430386, www.wendywutours.co.uk), good China all-rounder; Scott Dunn (020-8682 5060, www.scottdunn.com), offers the Banyan Tree hotels and spas; Cox & Kings (020-7873 5000, www.coxandkings.co.uk) for the Hotel of Modern Art and the Banyan Tree; BA Holidays (0870 2433406, www.ba.com) for Shanghai breaks and general trips; Explore (0870 3334001, www.explore.co.uk), good new family trips; Travel Indochina (01865 268940, www.travelindochina.co.uk) for Tibet; Collette Worldwide Holidays (0800 8048701, www.colletteworldwide.com) for Yangtze River cruises.

VISAS

All British nationals need a visa to visit the People's Republic of China (but not Hong Kong). Most tour operators will organise your visa if you book through them: expect to pay £65-plus. You can download the necessary forms and get more information from www.chinese-embassy.org.uk.

TOURIST BOARD

China National Tourist Office: 020-7373 0888, www.cnta.gov.cn. Hong Kong Tourism Board: 020-7533 7100, www.discoverhongkong.com.

Back to Interviews Page