But China was a hard habit to break, and I had signed a contract for this book, one that I had wanted to write for a very long time. 'Another month,' I told myself, 'and then you can say goodbye.' So I packed my bags, dragged myself to the airport, and flew to Shanghai, where my kind friend Gwen had offered me a room of my own, in her lovely flat in the French Concession. There, in businesslike fashion, I set about exploring the food traditions of eastern China.

In January 2007, I went back to China again for more than a month. My heart was not in it. I did wonder if I had reached the end of the road. Would it not be more honest, I asked myself, to admit that the gluttonous China phase of my life was over? It had been an incredible journey, for sure, and one that I wouldn't have missed for anything. But the joy of it had faded. Years before, I had abandoned one career based on other people's expectations of me, and it had been a liberation. Perhaps it was time to do the same thing again. Often, people were asking me, 'Which Chinese regional cuisine are you going to do next, Fuchsia?', assuming that I was planning to write a book about each province in turn. 'Are you crazy?' I wanted to reply. 'Do you know how many provinces there are? Do you know what Hunan did to me?'

Shanghai itself has become the darling of food journalists, who flock there to scoff 'soup dumplings' at the Nanxiang restaurant in the Yu Garden, and to dine at the celebrated Jean Georges on the Bund. But, by Chinese standards, Shanghai lacks history: it's a modern metropolis, owing its ascendancy to the foreign concessions built there in the mid-nineteenth century, and richer in 'fusion cuisine' than real culinary tradition. My researches were to take me to the more ancient centres of gastronomy, in the hinterlands of Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces.

While one might say that northern Beijing is the home of imperial cooking, southern Guangdong of the cuisine of the merchant class, and Sichuan of fiery peasant fare, eastern China is the gastronomic demesne of the cultivated man. It was in Hangzhou that the Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo encouraged the development of a marvellous stewed pork; and in Nanjing that the gourmet Yuan Mei wrote his famous cookery book. In the twentieth century, the writer Lu Wenfu set his novella The Gourmet, the story of the relationship between a reactionary gourmand and a puritanical communist over decades of revolution, in his hometown of Suzhou.

Yangzhou lies in the fertile southern Yangtze region, long recognised as a 'home of fish and rice' on account of the plenty of its produce. Since the Qin Dynasty it has been an administrative centre, although its roots as a settlement are yet more ancient. It came to prominence with the contruction, during the Sui and Tang Dynasties, of the Grand Canal, a waterway linking Hangzhou, even then a famous producer of silk and tea, with the old northern capitals at Luoyang and Xi'an. Yangzhou lay at the crucial intersection of the Grand Canal, running from north to south, and the Yangtze river, which flows from the mountains of Tibet to the eastern coast. As the transport hub of China, Yangzhou became one of its wealthiest cities. For centuries its name was a byword for luxury and sophistication. But after the railways came in the nineteenth century, leaving Yangzhou languishing on a secondary line, it became a relative backwater. These days tourists flock to Suzhou, for its gardens, and Hangzhou, for its pretty West Lake. But Yangzhou is off the beaten track.

The southern Yangtze region, in which these ancient cities lie, produces some of China's finest ingredients, including Jinhua cured ham, Shaoxing rice wine and Zhenjiang vinegar, as well as those famous hairy crabs. Many of its cities are known for speciality dishes: Hangzhou for Beggar's Chicken, Vinegar Fish and Dongpo Pork (named after the poet), Nanjing for its salted duck, and Suzhou for sizzling eel and a soup of leafy water-shield from the Taihu lake. Yet none of these places can compete with the culinary glory of Yangzhou, the ancient gastronomic capital of the east, and the cradle of what they call 'Huaiyang' or 'Weiyang' cuisine (the names have old geographical connotations).

For me, it was the last, vital missing piece of a jigsaw. For fifteen years I had roamed all over China, from the deserts of the west to Shanghai's 'Paris of the East', from colonial Hong Kong to the old imperial capital of Xi'an. My travels had been by no means exhaustive -- in China there is always more to explore -- but I had covered a great deal of gastronomic territory. Yet although I had glimpsed Yangzhou's cuisine in its influences on the courtly cooking of Beijing, and on the chic new restaurants of Shanghai, I had never actually been there. For a specialist in Chinese cuisine, this was an unforgivable omission.

It was a cool, sunny morning when I took the main Shanghai-Nanjing railway line as far as the old vinegar town of Zhenjiang, a slow-moving place where, even in the early twenty-first century, foreigners were as remarkable as martians; men in Mao suits carried chirruping crickets in their pockets, and a blacksmith, working on the pavement, hammered woks out of red-hot iron. A taxi carried me to the car-ferry port, where I walked aboard. And then I stood on the top deck as we wove our way across a shifting warp of barges and passenger ships on the Yangtze, whose waters glittered in the bright winter sun. When we reached the northern bank, I hitched a lift for the short hop to Yangzhou.

As usual, my preparation had been minimal. I had searched in vain for useful books about Yangzhou and its food. I did, however, have the address of the local branch of the Chinese Culinary Association in my notebook, and I knew from past experience that it might be a good place to start. Since it was early and I had little luggage, I simply hailed a bicycle rickshaw.

I wasn't expecting much of the trip. So many times I had arrived in a Chinese city that I didn't know, seduced by legends about its lively street life and architectural beauty, only to find that most of it had been demolished and replaced by monotonous concrete. Suzhou had lost most of its canals and old streets; I could find no old lanes in Hangzhou; and they were pulling Shanghai apart by the day. In my writing, I was determined to find beauty in these places, to bring alive their characters and rich culinary traditions, and yet it seemed increasingly like an exercise in archaeology rather than reportage. That's why Yangzhou was such a delightful surprise. From the moment my driver dropped me off near the city centre, I felt that there was something different about it.

I gave the driver the address of the association. 'Please will you take me through the old streets?' I asked, expecting him to tell me that they had been knocked down last year. But he didn't -- he actually drove me through the old streets. They were everything I had longed to see. We rambled over a canal bridge where a few people were selling pheasants, rabbits, and baskets of fruit, and into a long lane bordered by grey-brick courtyard houses, with alleys running off on either side. Old-fashioned cotton banners emblazoned with the Chinese characters for 'rice' and 'wine' hung outside little shops. There were street vendors too: an elderly man making pancakes on a griddle, a butcher mincing pork with a cleaver on a wooden board, someone selling home-made salted mustard greens, dark and sleek. Pig's ears and chunks of carp and chicken hung on the outer walls of houses, salted and spiced, wind-drying.

Even the busier streets in the old town had retained some character. They were lined with wutong trees and small shops selling kitchenware, clothes and locally made knives; they were busy with bicycles and unruly mopeds. We passed a mother cycling home with her son, his head resting gently on her back; a baker, standing beside an oven, wiping her hot face with a wet towel. This was no pastiche of local street life recreated for the tourists, but a living city. It reminded me of the vanished old quarters of Chengdu that I had known and adored.

The three deputy secretaries of the culinary association who were at work that day were immediately welcoming. I found them in a first-floor office piled with papers. They sat amid cupboards crammed with food magazines and books, looking out over low rooftops. The amiable, chain-smoking Mr Qiu made me a cup of tea, and they all gathered round for a chat. Within minutes we discovered that we had mutual friends -- professors of food history in Chengdu. I got along particularly well with the gruff-voiced, talkative Mr Xia, who seemed to know everything about Huaiyang cuisine. When the other two had drifted back to their desks, he and I continued to sip our tea as he taught me about Yangzhou's magnificent past.

The city was a famous trading port, he said, with direct commercial links to Japan, friendly relations with Persia and many other distant realms. Marco Polo supposedly stayed here in the late thirteenth century, and remarked on the 'large and splendid city… so great and powerful that its authority extends over twenty-seven cities, all large and prosperous and actively engaged in commerce'. Above all, Mr Xia told me, Yangzhou owed its wealth and opulence to the salt trade, which flourished during the Qing. Sea salt, evaporated in salt-ponds on the Shandong and Jiangsu coasts, was transported by water to Yangzhou, the largest wholesale salt market in China. It was such a profitable business that Yangzhou salt taxes came to make up a quarter of China's entire tax revenue.

On the back of their lucrative trade, the Yangzhou salt merchants grew rich. They built mansions and pleasure gardens, entertained lavishly, and led lives of great refinement. One of them compiled a collection of recipes that is still in print. Men of letters flocked to the city. During the Tang, the prominent poet Du Fu praised the beauty of its people, the wine-loving Li Bai penned lines inspired by local feasting and carousing, and Wang Jian wrote of the thousand lanterns that gleamed in its nightmarkets. The Song poet Su Dongpo also lived here for a while, taking up lodgings in the Stone Tower Buddhist Temple.

During the Qing Dynasty, the Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors were unable to resist the charms of Yangzhou. They must already have had a taste for its delicacies, because Huaiyang cooking had long been influential at court. They lingered in Yangzhou during their lengthy 'tours of the south', idling in its gardens, playing at fishing, and being entertained by the salt merchants to sumptuous feasts. The only extant description of the fabled Man-Han imperial banquet of the Qing era is in a chronicle of Yangzhou life and society, 'Record of the painted pleasure-boats of Yangzhou', written by a local playwright, Li Dou, in the eighteenth century: 'They had bird's nest with chicken slivers, abalone with pearl leaves, a thick soup of crab and shark skin, bear's paw with crucian carp tongues…' Li Dou listed more than a hundred dishes made with every fine ingredient, accompanied by fresh fruits and delicate vegetables.

Under the encouraging eyes of the association's deputy secretaries, I raised my chopsticks. First I tasted the 'four strands of flavour' (si tiao wei): tiny, stimulating dishes to awaken the palate. There were fried peanuts, cubes of fermented beancurd stained pink by red yeast rice, morsels of pickled cabbage and slices of ginger preserved in soy sauce. Afterwards, I moved on to the appetisers proper: savoury salt-water goose, 'vegetarian chicken' made from marinated beancurd skin, tiny 'drunken' river shrimps, crisp-and-supple sweet-sour cucumber, and a marvellous rendition of Zhenjiang yao rou. This was a terrine of shards of pork in aspic served with a dip of aromatic Zhenjiang vinegar. The yao rou, whose name might be translated as 'delectable meat', melted, divinely, in my mouth.

I left the office of the culinary association, later that afternoon, laden with gifts: glossy cookery books, academic studies of Yangzhou culture, an anthology of poems about Huaiyang cuisine, out-of-print collections of recipes. I was touched by the kindness and generosity of the food researchers I'd met, and captivated already by the magic of the city. Most satisfyingly of all, I left with an invitation to dinner.

'You see,' said Mr Xia, surveying a tempting spread of cold hors d'oeuvres, 'Yangzhou cooking is concerned with the ben wei, the essential tastes of things. Here you won't find the heavy sweetness of Suzhou cooking, or the spiciness of your Sichuanese. We like to show off the natural flavours of fresh and seasonal ingredients, subtly enhanced by seasonings like salt, sugar, oil, spring onion, ginger and vinegar. Please, eat!'

'Those last dishes were two of the so-called "three heads" of Yangzhou,' said Mr Xia. 'The third was a whole pig's head. But we thought that might be a bit excessive for today, given that there are only six of us. Perhaps another time we can gather a few more people for a full "three-headed" feast?' (Later, I learned the intriguing fact that the most acclaimed producers of the slow-cooked Yangzhou pig's head were monks at the Fahai Buddhist temple, who were officially, like all other monks, vegetarian. They would only show off this talent for carnivorous cookery to people they knew and trusted -- if a stranger knocked on the door and demanded a pig's head, they would be dismissed with a mischievous smile and a Buddhist greeting: 'A mi tuo fo!')

The main courses were just as delicately pleasing. We sampled 'hibiscus-flower fish slices', soft white pillows of fish-flesh blended with egg white and starch, tender as a custard but with a slight crispness to their bite; fresh broad beans with straw mushrooms; and a red-braised carp head with farmhouse beancurd, served on a grand blue-and-white china platter (Mr Xia probed out for me the sweet, fatty flesh around the fish's eye). And then there were the famous 'lion's head meatballs', cooked slowly in individual clay pots until they were so tender they yielded at a chopstick's touch.

I learned from my dining companions that Yangzhou cooks were known across China for the dexterity of their knifework. The lion's head meatball, for example, owed its irresistible succulence to the fact that the meat was hand-chopped into 'fish-eye' grains, and not minced or puréed. 'The cook's cleaver, of course,' said Mr Xia, 'is just one of the "Three Knives" of Yangzhou: the others are scissors, and the pedicurist's blade. "Foot-repairing" is another of this city's great pleasures. You must try it.' (Later, nervously, I entrusted my feet to a pedicurist who shaved bits off them until they were as soft and sweet as a newborn baby's.)

The next dish, Wensi Beancurd, also had Buddhist connections. In a dense broth hung filigree strands of silken beancurd, threaded with a few wisps of Jinhua ham. It was invented, so they say, by a Qing Dynasty monk at the Tianning Temple who was renowned for his beancurd cookery (he made a vegetarian version, seasoned with mushrooms). Earlier, at a beancurd stall in the backstreets, I had seen a man cutting curd for this dish. His sharp knife, slicing up and down, moved almost imperceptibly through the block of beancurd, shaving off slices as thin as silk. These he cut, in turn, transforming the slices into a mass of fine threads. It was masterful.

We sat there, talking in Chinese, of course, discussing the characteristics of Yangzhou cuisine. At one point during the meal, Mr Xia looked at me with sudden concern, and asked: 'I do hope you can take the flavour of Huaiyang dishes, when they are not hot and spicy like your usual Sichuanese food.' I looked back at him in puzzlement, but it was Mr Qiu who reminded him that I was not actually Sichuanese, but from England, so it was unlikely to be a problem. We all laughed, Mr Xia at his mistake, I because this curious exchange made me realise how often I did actually find myself referring to other foreigners as lao wai, and saying things like: 'In Sichuan, we tend to add a bit of chilli-bean paste to our red-braised dishes' or 'In Sichuan, we call it such-and-such' or 'In Sichuan, we drink the soup at the end of the meal'.

We finished our dinner, inevitably, with the one dish that the entire outside world recognises as a local speciality -- Yangzhou fried rice. On almost every restaurant menu in Western Chinatowns it appears, and finally I was tasting it in its place of origin. The rice was shot with tiny cubes of dark pink ham and brown shiitake, wisps of golden egg, crabmeat, and tiny shrimp. It was rich but not oily, wok-fragrant and utterly delicious. Afterwards, we rinsed our palates with a broth afloat with mushrooms and cai tai, a seasonal green, and then refreshed ourselves with slices of watermelon and fresh sugarcane from the south.

Over the next few days, I explored the landscaped gardens of Yangzhou. The grandest was the Slender West Lake Park, upon which the salt merchants had lavished their funds to make it fit for the Qianlong Emperor's visit. The curves of the lake were softened by weeping willows; pavilions and ornamental bridges dotted its shores and inlets. I wandered to the end of the spit of rock where the emperor had cast his fishing line. It was like walking in a Chinese ink-and-water painting.

We had been joined for the meal by a young officer from the local government trade office, Mr Liu, and a chef named Chen. When we had finished eating, Liu and I went for a walk along the Grand Canal at the south of the old town. Peach trees and weeping willows grew along the banks. People were ballroom dancing outside pavilions festooned in fairy lights. We caught the last pleasure boat of the night, and as we were the only passengers, we asked the driver to switch off the lamps. So we stood on the prow with the breeze in our faces and tried to imagine that we were emperors, on a visit from Beijing to sample the delights of the south ('and to find a pretty concubine' said Liu, with a laugh).

Perhaps Yangzhou had a particular meaning for me because I was in the midst of reading Cao Xueqin's great eighteenth-century Chinese novel, A Dream of Red Mansions (also known as The Story of the Stone). It is a family saga, the tale of four generations of the Jia clan who live together in two neighbouring mansions in a notional Chinese capital in northern China. Although the novel is set in the north, Cao himself came from the southern Yangtze region, and the life he describes resembles that of the Yangzhou literati. Cao wrote the novel while living in poverty in Beijing, after the collapse of his once-illustrious family's fortunes. Many of the characters are thought to be be based on real people, the friends and relatives of Cao's own youth, and it is generally seen as a nostalgic evocation of his past.

In the more modest He Garden, built in the nineteenth century by a local official, I climbed the steps of a rockery to a tiny pavilion, where I sat and wrote for a while, engulfed by the intoxicating scent of winter plum blossom. Down below, in a two-storey building with a tiled roof that curved up at the ends, two musicians were practising. A middle-aged lady sung a plaintive tune, while an er hu player drew his bow over strings. Before me lay a miniature landscape tailored to appeal to a certain Chinese literary sensibility. Every feature had a name of poetic allusion. There were hidden promonteries from which to view the garden, places where a scholar might pause and be inspired to compose a few lines. At the far end of the complex was a pond designed to mirror the moon's reflection. Sitting in my eyrie, writing at a marble table, I felt at peace.

Somehow the elegance of the city had endured, despite everything. Like almost anywhere in China, Yangzhou had been damaged by the communists, who demolished its ancient city walls, carved up the salt merchants' mansions, and unleashed the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Its relative obscurity, however, had saved it from the worst ravages of the reform period. In Suzhou, I'd seen how the Xuanmiao Temple was penned in by American fast-food outlets, and the bicycle rickshaws plastered with McDonalds advertisements. No one had bothered to smear Yangzhou with such tacky commercialisation. Slum buildings along the canal had been cleared, and the banks of the canal redeveloped, but local leaders had decided to protect and revive the old city. High-rises were banned in the historic centre, and they were gradually restoring the salt merchants' mansions to their former splendour.

In English translation, it is a novel in five volumes, and for the few months I spent reading it, it took over my life. The story begins in the 'golden days' of the family's history, when the young Jia cousins amuse themselves in the Prospect Garden. They hold poetry competitions, play drinking games, devour hairy crabs and admire chrysanthemums. As the novel progresses, the tale becomes darker. There are suicides, kidnappings and savage betrayals. Eventually the family's wealth is confiscated by the imperial authorities, and the Jias' reputation lost amid a storm of scandal. But I travelled to Yangzhou when I was still absorbed in the first, happier volumes of the novel, the Golden Days, and everything I experienced there seemed to resonate with the gilded life of the Jias.

Perhaps, compared with Yangzhou's heydays in the Tang and Qing, when it was one of the most polished cities in the world, it was now just a shadow of itself. But wherever I went, I found echoes of its legendary refinement and charm: in the gardens, in the food, and above all in the graciousness of the people I met.

Mr Xia had invited me for breakfast at a salt merchants' mansion that had been turned into a restaurant and a museum. A gentle mist blotted the willow trees as I hurried along the canal to meet him. Outside the mansion's long, grey-brick walls, some middle-aged ladies were practising Tai Chi. Inside, Mr Xia was waiting for me, in a grand hall with high ceilings and wooden panelling, wearing a baseball cap and clutching his jar of home-brewed tea. Once, this was part of the inner quarters of the mansion, where the grand ladies of the household would have sat at their needlework, but now it was crowded with working men and women, chatting and laughing quietly over their breakfasts. Waitresses in padded pink silk jackets bustled around bearing towers of steamers.

'The early-morning tea breakfast is an institution in Yangzhou, just as it is in Guangdong,' said Mr Xia. 'The difference is that the Cantonese like to discuss business over their dumplings. Here we just like to relax and have fun.'

Our breakfast was extraordinarily delicious. We ate steamed buns stuffed with radish slivers; with chopped pork, bamboo shoot, mushrooms and tiny shrimps; and with finely-chopped greens. There were juicy steamed dumplings with a sweet, meaty filling; grilled buns with toasted sesame; dry beancurd slivers with soy sauce and sesame oil. 'Look at this bao zi,' said Mr Xia, pointing at a bun resting in a bamboo steamer, 'it's beautiful. See how delicately it has been wrapped. The folds are so even. And the flavour, you'll find, is excellent: a rich savouriness balanced by a hint of sweetness.'

Most advocates of Chinese local cuisines insist that theirs is the best in China, and disparage the cooking of other regions. But in Yangzhou I was tempted to agree with the culinary patriots. Yangzhou food, as they say, combines the strengths of the cooking traditions of northern and southern China. It is about the art of balance, the miraculous transformation of ingredients in the pot that the chef Yi Yin had talked about more than three thousand years ago. Yangzhou cooks are famously particular in their selection of raw ingredients. They insist on the tenderest of spinach leaves, the hearts of cabbages, the crispest tips of bamboo shoots. They have rules on seasonality: no drunken crabs after the Lantern Festival, no hairtail anchovy after the Feast of Clear Brightness. And lion's head meatballs, though available all year round, are cooked with bamboo shoots in spring, freshwater mussel in summer, crab coral in autumn, and wind-dried chicken in winter.

Yet despite their strikingly different characters, the cuisines of Sichuan and Yangzhou are nonetheless related. They are linked by the artery of the Yangtze River, and also by their enviable geographies -- the fecund soils and abundant produce that helped to supply their famous kitchens, and which enabled the more fortunate of their people to lead lives of great luxury and refinement. Talented cooks in either place conjure up banquets of unbelievable variety, but they express themselves in different registers. 'Huaiyang cuisine is like Sichuanese cuisine without the spiciness,' as Mr Xia told me once. In the Tang Dynasty, they used to say 'Yangzhou first and Chengdu second', in wonder at the flourishing economies and cultures of these two beautiful cities.

Yangzhou food doesn't jump up and amaze you, like its Sichuanese counterpart. It won't make your lips tingle, or dance jazz on your tongue. It is not a sassy spice girl with red lipstick and a sharp wit, thrusting itself into the limelight. Yangzhou food is an altogether gentler creature. Like one of the Jia cousins in A Dream of Red Mansions, it sits in a landscaped garden, ornaments of jade and gold in its hair, composing poetry at a marble table. It seduces by understatement, with its delicate colours (pale pink, green, yellow), fine stocks, soft and soothing textures, and sensitivity to salt and sweetness.

I don't know what it was that made me fall so completely for Yangzhou. Perhaps it began with the sun glittering on the waters of the Yangtze; maybe it was the old streets, which brought back so many memories of my beloved Chengdu. Or perhaps it was the extraordinary kindness of Mr Xia and his colleagues, and their modest pride in Huaiyang culinary culture. I also had the sense there of a city being rescued and reborn from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution, and of hope in a Chinese future that was more than just rampant capitalism.

Two and a half centuries after the Qianlong Emperor had been mesmerised by Yangzhou, the city still had an irresistible pull, and it worked on me like a tonic. Softly and imperceptibly, it melted away my bitterness and exasperation at China. Chef Chen, to whom I had been introduced at that first fine meal with my friends at the culinary association, told me: 'Hunanese cooking, with all those bold and brassy flavours, is the food of war -- look at the military leaders it nourished. Yangzhou food is the food of peace. In times of harmony, that is what you should eat.' Somehow his words expressed perfectly my own feeling that being in Yangzhou was, for me, a kind of peace after the war of writing my Hunanese cookbook.

Many Chinese friends have spoken to me over the last few years of a historical progression from 'eating to fill your belly' (chi bao), through 'eating plenty of rich food', (chi hao) to 'eating skilfully' (chi qiao). In the past, they say, food was just about sustenance; starvation was a constant threat. With growing wealth, the Chinese began to eat as much meat and fish as they could, as if to make up for years of deprivation. Now, though, the thrill of plenty is wearing off, and a growing number are trying to eat with more discernment, seeking out 'green food products', reducing their consumption of animal foods, and ordering less gluttonously in restaurants.

In Yangzhou, after my own period of 'eating plenty of rich food' in China, I found myself eating more 'skilfully'. I dined out with the officers of the culinary association on food that wasn't full of colourings and MSG. I ate well, but not excessively, at the old Yechun teahouse by the canal, famous for its buns and dumplings. And I wasn't offered meat from a single endangered species. Gradually, my appetite returned, and eating became a pleasure once more. I felt my spirits lifting.

It was my last day in Yangzhou, and I wanted to visit a mansion near the Grand Canal that had caught my eye, several times, as I passed. It was a vast and imposing complex of courtyards and halls that had just been restored and opened as a museum. So I bought my ticket and went inside. Somewhere in the midst of the house, in a small courtyard with its own well, I was pleased to find an old-fashioned kitchen. The bright, airy room was dominated by an enormous cooking range, built in brick, covered in whitewashed plaster, and decorated with blue line-drawings of a blooming lotus and a fish. On top, a Kitchen God presided in his shrine. There were four 'fire-mouths' on the stove, two with wooden lids covering inset woks, one for the rice-steamer and one for a stack of bamboo steamers to cook buns and dumplings.

In a sense, Yangzhou rescued me, and my Chinese food-writing career. Like a dream of red mansions, it reminded me, not only of the vanished elegance of a certain aspect of the Chinese past, but also of my own lost love for China. Chengdu as I had known it might have been swept away by the tidal wave of real-estate development, but in Yangzhou, with its understated charm, its delicious food, and its exceptionally kind and elegant people, I found something of the same enchantment. Yangzhou rekindled the fire. I knew then that I could, and would write this book, and that there was life yet in my relationship with China.

As we chatted, I became aware of a man and woman watching me from the edge of the room, and discreetly eavesdropping on our conversation. Eventually, when the old men had exhausted their kitchen memories and bid me goodbye, these two came forward and greeted me. 'Hello, may we trouble you a little?' said the man. 'My name is Zhang Wenjie, and I am the manager of the People's Number One Hospital, which owns this land. This is Yuan Yuan, the manager of the museum.' He seemed friendly and open, and Mrs Yuan had a gentle, soft face and was dressed in a fitted coat, with a mother-of-pearl clasp in her hair. 'Won't you come with us, and drink some tea?'

It was the only old Yangzhou range I'd seen, and I wasn't sure how everything worked. Luckily for me, the other visitors that day were three elderly men in Mao suits who remembered such stoves from their childhoods. 'When we were young,' said one, 'everyone had ranges like this. You see those cubbyholes at the back, they were for seasonings: you know, the salt, the oil, sugar, soy sauce and vinegar. And those cupboards underneath, you could store your wok brushes there, or put wet shoes inside to dry them out. The hooks hanging from the ceiling were for hams and smoked ribs. And you stacked up the firewood behind the stove.'

There was some unspoken eagerness behind his invitation, but I had no idea what it meant. They led me through a labyrinth of courtyards, and then up a little path to an anomalous two-storey building in a walled garden. It was built in the Western colonial style, with red and grey bricks, casement windows and a wooden verandah, and stood awkwardly within the walls of a traditional Chinese mansion. The ground floor had been turned into a teahouse for tourists, but we didn't stop there: they led me up a wooden staircase to the private rooms on the upper storey. The innermost room had been restored in the 1930s 'European' style, with a fireplace, glass-fronted cabinets, and Chinese wooden sofas around a coffee table. In the corner, a wind-up gramophone sat on a table, its brass horn flaring above. 'This is known as the yang lou, the foreigners' building,' said Mr Zhang.

We sat around the coffee table, and they offered me tea. Again, I had the sense that there was more to their hospitality than met the eye, but they just smiled and chatted politely. I noticed that there was an old 78 record on the gramophone, and suggested that we play it. To oblige me, Mr Zhang cranked up the machine, and set the needle in the crackly groove. I was expecting a musical glimpse of the thirties, something like 'Nights of Shanghai' by Zhou Xuan. It would have suited the atmosphere so perfectly, the gentle urbanity of my hosts, the delicacy of the tea, and the cosmopolitan atmosphere of this curious room. So it was a shock when we heard the shrill marching tune of a Maoist anthem. It jarred, horribly. We smiled at one another in embarrassment as Mr Zhang lifted the needle and let the gramophone wind down in silence.

'Let me tell you the story of this place,' said Mr Zhang. 'The mansion was built in 1904 by a Yangzhou man named Wu Yinsun, a customs official who was posted to Ningbo, in neighbouring Zhejiang Province. He intended to return here when he retired from official life, so he bought the land, and built the complex mainly in the Zhejiang style. His plan was to start a trading business, so he had this building designed as a suitable place for receiving yang ren, foreign businessmen. But Wu never returned to Yangzhou, so the foreign businessmen never came. In 1949, the whole mansion was requisitioned by the new communist government, who gave it to the Number One People's Hospital. They converted it into living quarters for hospital workers: at one time it was home to a hundred families. But this building, the yang lou, was left to decay. The verandahs collapsed, and it became unsafe to enter.

'Now we've restored it, as you can see,' he said, gesturing towards the sleek new wood of the verandah, the neat brickwork. Then he smiled, a little bashful. 'In fact, you are the first foreigner who has ever come into the yang lou, that's why we wanted to invite you.' He and Mrs Yuan waited, a little nervously, for my response.

I was overcome with a sudden sense of all the time that had passed since I first came as a foreigner to China, and of all that had happened to me in those years. I had learned to speak Chinese, and in some ways to think and feel in the language. I had developed deep ties of affection with my Chinese friends, and had roamed all over the country. I had learned to eat everything, and had even trained as a Chinese chef. Yet however much of an insider I had become, in some ways, it seemed, I would always be a yang ren, a foreigner, a lao wai. It was a sobering thought, but a sweet one, under the circumstances.

Then Mr Zhang summoned the photographer who had been waiting in the wings, and asked if I would mind if they marked the occasion for posterity. So I posed for photographs by the fireplace and out on the verandah, smiling brightly, flanked by the director and the hospital boss, a token foreigner in the building built for my alien kind.

In the yang lou, I wanted to hug Mr Zhang and Mrs Yuan, but that's not what Chinese people do. I was moved, and somehow delighted. Finally, after more than a century, the late Mr Wu's occidentalist dream had been fulfilled, and by pure coincidence I was the agent of this fulfilment.