The preserved duck eggs were served as an hors d'oeuvre in a fashionable Hong Kong restaurant, sliced in half, with a ginger-and-vinegar dip. It was my first trip to Asia, and I had rarely seen anything so revolting on a dinner table. They leered up at me like the eyeballs of some nightmarish monster, dark and threatening. Their albumens were a filthy, translucent brown, their yolks an oozy black, ringed with a layer of greenish, mouldy grey. About them hung a faintly sulphurous haze. I tried one, just to be polite, but its noxious aroma made me feel nauseous and I found it hard to swallow. Afterwards, a slick of toxic black slime from the yolk clung to my chopsticks, threatening to pollute everything else I ate. Surreptitiously, I tried to wipe them on the tablecloth.

My cousin Sebastian, who was having me to stay for a few days before I left for Mainland China, had ordered the eggs, and he, along with his Eurasian friends, was eating pieces of them with gay abandon. I couldn't let any of them see my own discomfort. It was a matter of pride. After all, I was supposed to be an adventurous eater.

My food explorations had begun at an early age. I was brought up in a household that was always filled with exotic flavours. My mother taught English as a foreign language in Oxford, and when I was small, her students -- among them Turks, Sudanese, Iranians, Sicilians, Colombians, Libyans and Japanese -- often took over our kitchen to cook up feasts that reminded them of home. Our Japanese au pair girl made riceballs for my sister and me for breakfast, and our Spanish au pair boy telephoned his mother for the details of her famous paella. As for my mother, she cooked curries she'd been taught by my unofficial Hindu godfather, Vijay, while my father experimented with surrealist dishes like purple mashed potatoes with green scrambled eggs. When my Austrian grandfather visited, he prepared recipes he'd learned during his time as a wartime commando in Burma and Ceylon. At a time when most English people were living on toad in the hole, corned-beef hash and macaroni cheese, we were eating hummus, lentil curry, cacik and caponata. I certainly wasn't the kind of girl who would blanch at the sight of a snail or a kidney.

Yet Chinese food was something different. Of course I'd had the occasional Chinese takeaway as a child, deep-fried pork balls served with a bright-red sweet-and-sour sauce, chicken with bamboo shoots and egg-fried rice. Later, I had visited a few Chinese restaurants in London. But nothing had prepared me for the gastronomic assaults of that first trip to Hong Kong and China in the autumn of 1992.

I went there because of my job. I was working in the Monitoring department of the BBC, sub-editing news reports from the Asia-Pacific region. After a few months of immersion in the strange, twilight world of Chinese politics, I had decided I wanted to see the country for myself, and Hong Kong, where I had a few friends, was my first port of call. I was immediately drawn to the food. Sebastian, who was working in the territory as a graphic designer, showed me around the wet markets of Wanchai on Hong Kong Island. Other expatriate friends took me out to restaurants and ordered their favourite dishes. There were many delightful surprises: exquisite roast goose, sparklingly fresh seafood and myriad delicate dim sum dumplings. Even the cheapest and most nondescript restaurants served stir-fries and soups more delicious than any I had tasted in England, and the sheer variety of the food on offer was dazzling. But I was also faced with many new ingredients that I found disconcerting -- or disgusting.

Soon after that dinner with Sebastian and his friends, I crossed the border into Mainland China and took the slow train to Guangzhou. There I visited the notorious Qingping market, where badgers, cats and tapirs languished in cages in the meat section, and the medicine stalls displayed sacks filled with dried snakes and lizards, scorpions and flies. For dinner, I was offered 'roasted piggy', frog casserole and stir-fried snake, its flesh still edged in reptilian skin. Some of these things -- such as that stir-fried snake -- turned out to be unexpectedly palatable. Others, like the loathsome preserved duck eggs (or 'thousand-year-old eggs' as they are called in the West), had tastes or textures that made my flesh crawl.

But I have never been one to turn down a taste of something new. Although in some ways I'm a cautious person, I have a streak of recklessness that tends to land me regularly in situations outside my zone of comfort. By the time I reached China, I had travelled widely in Europe and Turkey, and I was used to being shocked and challenged. My parents had also brought me up to eat whatever I was offered, in that polite English way, and it would have seemed unforgiveably rude to leave anything in my ricebowl in China, even if it had six legs or a sulphurous aroma. So from the beginning of that first trip, almost without thinking about it, I braced myself to eat whatever the Chinese might put in front of me.

Since the first European merchants and missionaries began recording their impressions of life in China, foreigners have been astounded by the Chinese diet. In the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo noted with distaste that Chinese people liked eating snakes and dogs and even, in some places, he claimed, human flesh. The French Jesuit historian Jean-Baptiste du Halde adopted a tone of wonder in his description of the exotic Chinese diet in 1736: 'Stags-Pizzles… Bears-Paws… nay they do not scruple eating Cats, Rats, and such like animals.' Chinese banquets have always been a cause for trepidation for outsiders because of the use of shark's fin, sea cucumbers and other rubbery delicacies, and because so many of the ingredients are simply unrecognisable. The British surgeon C. Toogood Downing, writing in the nineteenth century, described British sailors in the trading port of Guangzhou picking carefully at their food, 'lest they should detect themselves in the act of devouring an earthworm, or picking the delicate bones of a cat.'

Nearly two centuries later, in the early twenty-first century, Chinese food has become part of the fabric of British and American life. In Britain, even the smallest towns have Chinese restaurants; supermarket shelves are lined with Chinese ready meals and stir-fry sauces; and 65 per cent of British households now own a wok. In 2002, Chinese food even overtook Indian as the country's favourite 'ethnic' cuisine. Yet still a dark, muscular fear of the unknown lurks beneath the surface. In a notorious article published in 2002 under the headline 'Chop Phooey!', the Daily Mail denounced Chinese food as 'the dodgiest in the world, created by a nation that eats bats, snakes, monkeys, bears' paws, birds' nests, sharks' fins, ducks' tongues and chickens' feet.' Echoing the fears of the early European travellers, it said you could never be sure what the 'oozing Day-Glo foodstuff balanced between your chopsticks' actually was.

There is nothing the British press prefers to publish or, apparently, the public to read, than a juicy story about a Chinese restaurant serving dog hotpot or penis stew. These disgusting delicacies seem to exert an irresistible pull. A story about a penis restaurant in Beijing was one of the most popular on the BBC news website for a long period in 2006. The following year, British television broadcast a four-part series about the comedian Paul Merton's travels in China. One of the aspects of Chinese culture the series covered was food, and what delicacies did they feature? Dog meat and penises! Seven centuries after Marco Polo wrote about the Chinese penchant for dog, nearly three centuries after Du Halde exclaimed at stags' pizzles, Westerners remain fixated, obsessed even, with the weird fringes of Chinese gastronomy.

Chinese communities have, on the whole, been strangely silent in the face of these disparaging stereotypes. Perhaps it's because they see 'eating everything' as unremarkable. Although a typical Chinese meal consists largely of grains, pork and vegetables, with a bit of fish or seafood thrown in, depending on the region, there is little that can't be considered a potential ingredient. Most people eat dog meat and donkey penis rarely, if at all, but there is no taboo in China about the idea of eating them.

The Chinese don't generally divide the animal world into the separate realms of pets and edible creatures: unless you are a strict Buddhist (and bearing in mind certain regional preferences), you might as well eat them all. Likewise, there is no conceptual divide between 'meat' and 'inedible rubbery bits' when butchering an animal carcass: in China they traditionally favour the kind of nose-to-tail eating of which restaurateur Fergus Henderson, the notorious English purveyor of offal, could only dream. As the poet Christopher Isherwood memorably wrote during his travels in China in the late 1930s: 'Nothing is specifically either eatable or uneatable. You could begin munching a hat, or bite a mouthful out of a wall; equally you could build a hut with the food provided at lunch.'

For me, the height of Chinese omnivorousness is to be found in a cookery book written by a chef and restaurateur I know from Hunan Province. It is a nice-looking, full-colour book that cheerfully enacts the worst nightmares of every foreigner who might be squeamish about Chinese food. The heads and feet of various fowl loll over the rims of soup tureens and serving dishes. Ten fishheads peer up out of a 'sea' of mashed beancurd and eggwhite, their open mouths stuffed with fishballs made from their own cooked flesh. Eleven lizards have been partially skinned and then deep-fried, so their bodies, golden and crisp like chicken nuggets, are sandwiched between scaly tails and heads in which the ruined eyeballs have been replaced by fresh green peas. One grand platter holds ten whole turtles which look as though they might wake up and shuffle away at any moment.

My favourite photograph in the book depicts a whippy egg-white pudding decorated with maraschino cherries and chocolate sprinkles. How unfortunate, I thought, that it has been photographed in such a way that the sprinkles look like ants -- until I peered at the small print and discovered the 'pudding' was in fact sprinkled with ants, which, the notes say, are good for dispelling rheumatism. And then, on page forty-five, the pièce de résistance, a whole puppy, roasted crisp, splayed out on a plate after having been attacked with a cleaver, so its skull is split in half, an eye and a nostril on each side, served with an elegant garnish of coriander, and flowers made from pink radish. Could any racist cartoonist have created a better stereotype of the disgustingly omnivorous Chinese?

That first visit of mine to China in 1992 was a revelation. The country was so vibrant and disorganised, so unlike the monochrome, totalitarian place I'd been expecting -- those indelible images of crowds in Mao suits brandishing Little Red Books. Through train windows I gazed out at vivid landscapes of rice paddies and fish ponds, where farmers worked and water buffalo grazed. I visited an incredible circus in Guangzhou where people put snakes up their noses and danced barefoot on broken glass. I cycled along the beautiful Li River near Guilin; and discussed the Cultural Revolution with a group of elderly political delegates on a passenger ship sailing through the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River. I was charmed and enthralled by almost everything I saw. Back in London, I enrolled in evening classes in Mandarin and started writing quarterly round-ups of Chinese news for the magazine China Now. I even began to experiment with a few Chinese recipes, from Yan-Kit So's Classic Chinese Cookbook. All this was just the beginning of a fascination with China that would take over my life. And as my involvement with China gained pace, so did my explorations of Chinese food.

It is not an easy thing for a traveller to go completely native in her tastes. What we eat is an essential part of who we are and how we define ourselves. Keeping up cultural traditions when abroad is no trivial matter; it is a deeply felt way of protecting ourselves from the threat of the unknown. We take holiday vaccinations to shield our bodies from the risk of invasion by foreign diseases; similarly, we may eat familiar foods while abroad to shield ourselves from the threat of exposure to different cultures. It wasn't just for their amusement that the British colonialists who lived in Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dressed for dinner and drank cocktails every evening. They knew that if they didn't, they risked losing themselves, like those English eccentrics in India who threw themselves so wholeheartedly into the local culture that they forgot where they really belonged.

In the nineteenth century, many of the British residents in Shanghai and the other treaty ports avoided Chinese food as far as possible, living on 'metallic' meals of tinned and bottled foods imported from home. The Anglo-Chinese Cookbook, published in the 1920s (in two volumes, one in English for the mistress, one in Chinese for the cook), lists classic recipes for lobster bisque and pigeon pie, and though it includes some exotic dishes such as 'Hungarian Goulasch' and 'Indian Curry', it makes no mention whatsoever of Chinese cuisine. The authors' fear of the omnivorous Chinese, hovering in the shadows, waiting to pounce, is almost palpable.

Somehow, it seems that the more foreign a country, and the more alien the diet of its natives, the more rigidly expatriates living there want to adhere to the rituals of their homelands. It's safer that way. Even now, many of my expatriate European friends in China live largely on European food at home. You take on the food of another country at your peril. Do it, and you inevitably loosen your own cultural moorings, and destabilise your fundamental sense of identity. It's a risky business.

So this is a book about the unexpected wonders of Chinese cuisine. It is also the tale of an English girl who went to China, ate everything, and was sometimes surprised at the consequences.