I had imagined Peking, or Beijing as it is now called, to be a city enveloped by smog and high-rise buildings. I’m sure that these phenomena do afflict the Chinese capital but throughout our visit the weather was beautifully blue and clear and I found a city much more laid back than I ever imagined.

We arrived via our high speed rail link from Xi’an. China now has the world’s longest high speed rail mileage: over 14,000 miles compared to the UK’s less than 500 miles. OK, China’s a bit bigger than the UK but that’s still no excuse for the country which invented the iron horse. George Stephenson would not be pleased.

The empress dowager Cixi continues to be a controversial figure with her mixed support for both traditional values and reforms. Some even accuse her of having put an end, through her ambiguous policies, to the Chinese empire. Certainly, Cixi was the only dowager empress to wield power ruling ‘behind the curtains’ (in mandarin ‘chui lian ting zheng.’)

There are, of course, many other world historical examples of women wielding the real power behind supposed male rulers. (Sisi, Lucrezia Borgia and the Queen Mum come to mind). Cixi, however, remains a supreme example, not least because she was behind the restoration and expansion of the summer palace which is on the outskirts of Beijing and because her death in 1908 left a China in chaos and ready for revolution.

Unlike western palaces, which tend to consist of one main block, Chinese palaces are made up of a variety of pavilions and courtyards. They are, in effect, miniature royal cities.

The origins of the summer palace date back to the Jin dynasty of the twelfth century. The palace gardens were greatly expanded in the 18th century when an entire artificial lake, Kunming, was excavated with its spoil used to create longevity hill crowned by a pagoda.

We walked down a gallery half a mile long and decorated with some beautiful naturalistic scenes.

At the end was a remarkable marble vessel used for entertainments by the empress.

The whole area was delightful and we could have spent much more time exploring the palace’s various pavilions and pagodas.

Only afterwards did I find out that what I had visited was the new summer palace. There had, in fact, been an old summer palace of even greater beauty with matchless artistic treasures. It had been destroyed, together with many court servants, by a punitive English force led by Lord Elgin in retaliation for the murder of two British envoys to the Chinese court. The ruins of the old palace remain a thorn in the side of many Chinese to this day and are certainly a part of British imperial history many of us would wish to forget. The opium wars behind these events are, indeed, a very sorry episode.

A pleasure garden

Spreads its perfumes around me

While an empire falls.