Beijing & Shanghai, 6 Nights

Beijing has two international airports, Capital and Daxing, and either way the private transfer into the city takes around an hour in ordinary traffic. Rooms are usually ready from mid-afternoon. Keep the first evening easy: a stroll down the pedestrian stretch of Wangfujing, or an early dinner. The city has a fair number of Indian and vegetarian restaurants, and the hotel desk will know the nearest. An early night is wise, because the drive to the Wall leaves after breakfast.

North-west out of the city to Juyongguan, roughly an hour and a quarter away, where the wall runs up both sides of a pass that guarded the road into the capital for centuries. The steps are uneven and properly steep, so climb as far as suits and turn back; nobody has to reach a tower. The Summer Palace lies on the same side of Beijing, which is why it belongs on this day: Kunming Lake, the Long Corridor with its thousands of painted scenes, and the marble boat Empress Dowager Cixi paid for. A pause at the Olympic Green for the Bird's Nest stadium rounds things off.

The centre of old Beijing, taken from south to north. Tiananmen Square comes first, with the gate and its portrait closing the northern end. Beyond that gate is the Forbidden City, home to twenty-four Ming and Qing emperors: courtyard after courtyard of red walls and yellow-glazed roofs. Tickets are sold in advance against passport numbers and it closes on Mondays, so the Beijing days are ordered around it. After lunch, the Temple of Heaven in the south of the city, where the emperor prayed for good harvests and where retired Beijingers now play cards, sing and practise tai chi under the cypresses.

A morning transfer to Beijing South for the high-speed train, which runs the roughly 1,300 km to Shanghai in four and a half to five hours. Seats are reserved, there is a buffet car and a trolley, and vegetarians do well to carry some snacks of their own. Met at Shanghai Hongqiao and driven to the hotel. In the evening, walk the Bund: the curve of 1920s banks and trading houses along the Huangpu river, facing the lit-up skyline of Pudong on the far bank.

Yu Garden in the morning, a Ming-dynasty family garden of rockeries, carp ponds and moon gates, with the zigzag bridge and the old teahouse just outside its walls. Then the Shanghai Museum on People's Square for its bronzes, ceramics and calligraphy, one of the finest collections of Chinese art anywhere. The afternoon crosses the river to Pudong, where the observation deck on the 88th floor of the Jin Mao Tower looks straight down on the city grid and across at its taller neighbours, the Shanghai Tower and the bottle-opener profile of the World Financial Center.

A gentler morning at the Jade Buddha Temple, a working monastery in the Jing'an district built to house two white-jade Buddhas brought from Burma in the late nineteenth century, one seated and one reclining. From there it is a short hop to Nanjing Road, the city's historic shopping street, pedestrianised from People's Square almost to the Bund. The afternoon is free: the plane trees and villas of the former French Concession, the alleys of Tianzifang, or a silk shop for anyone buying.

Breakfast at the hotel, then the transfer to Pudong International for the flight home, about an hour in normal traffic and more at rush hour. With a late flight, the hotel will hold bags after check-out and the morning can go on a last walk near the hotel or a coffee in the French Concession. Allow plenty of time at the airport: departure halls at Pudong are large and security is thorough.