
The family arrives in Beijing and steps, through a private garden gate, into the grounds of the old Summer Palace, the imperial park where the hotel itself stands. The first evening is that rare thing in a city of twenty million, genuine quiet, the imperial gardens settling into dusk around you, the scale and the calm of it a fitting overture to the wonders of the coming days.

The greatest palace complex on earth is walked privately and at a pace a child can absorb, nine thousand rooms unfolding through gate after crimson gate, the throne halls and the courtyards where an empire's ceremony once played out. You climb the hill park behind it for the view across a sea of golden roofs, the sheer ambition of imperial China laid out below in a single sweep.

Out early to a quieter, beautifully restored stretch of the Great Wall, where a cable car lifts you to the ramparts and the wall snakes away over the hills in both directions further than the eye can follow. You walk it with the mountains falling away on either side, and the descent comes by toboggan, a swooping, laughing run back down the mountainside that no child has ever forgotten.

A day in old Beijing, its life lived at street level. A bicycle ride threads the hutong lanes, the grey-walled alleys where the city's older rhythms survive, a dumpling-making class puts everyone's hands in the dough, and the great circular altar of the Temple of Heaven, read as geometry and history, shows how an emperor once addressed the cosmos on behalf of his people.

A private high-speed train carries the family south to Xi'an, once the greatest city in the world and the eastern anchor of the Silk Road. The evening is spent up on the intact city walls, the widest and best-preserved in China, lit against the dark, the family walking or cycling a stretch of the ramparts as the old capital glows below.

Early, and with an archaeologist to read them, you stand before the buried army of the first emperor, rank upon rank of life-sized clay soldiers, each with an individual face, that stood in the dark for two thousand years until a farmer sinking a well broke through in 1974. The scale of one man's fear of death, and the artistry summoned to answer it, land with overwhelming force on every member of the family.

A family bicycle ride runs the full circuit of Xi'an's fourteenth-century walls, the whole old city laid out within, and the day gives itself to the Muslim Quarter, whose food street has fed Silk Road travellers for a thousand years, a Halal feast of hand-pulled noodles, spiced lamb and sesame breads eaten where the caravans once unloaded.

A gentler day of craft and treasure. A workshop in calligraphy or dumpling-making occupies willing hands, and the highlights of the Shaanxi History Museum bring the dynasties into focus through the objects they left behind, chosen and paced for what a child will actually want to linger over.

A final morning before your master chauffeur provides a smooth executive transfer for the family to Xi'an Xianyang Airport for your onward flight.