IT MIGHT be the jetlag, or the Temazepam pills that I’ve been guzzling to counter it, or the dizzying fumes of the dieselly Beijing pollution, but the more that I seem to find out about China the more intriguingly complicated it all seems to get.

This is my first visit; and the country, of course, is completely beguiling. But, for the beginner, it is also utterly baffling. And how, I now wonder as I gaze out of my high-rise hotel, and see the life of the capital laid out in miniature below me, can I begin to navigate my way to the heart of it? It is not just the traffic laws that appear unfathomable. Can the tourist discover anything of China’s truth?

Of course, the nation has opened up enormously since the demise of Chairman Mao. Huge blank-faced ministry buildings packed with bureaucrats may still legislate in the name of Karl Marx, but outside the streets are a-glitter with capitalist aspirations. China is being branded as a great global power. Travellers — not least with the forthcoming Olympics — are encouraged (even as vagrants are banned). The Thomas Cook agency that organised my trip is no longer confined strictly to state-approved itineraries. It will tailor-make tours for its clients.

Certainly, the Forbidden City is no longer forbidden. China: The Three Emperors, which opens later this autumn at the Royal Academy, will display spectacular treasures from this once-sacred centre of empire. Many are being brought to Europe for the first time. Forty years ago, in the name of revolution, the Red Guard ransacked thousands of cultural sites. But now China is keen to tout modern attitudes — and a sign of this modernisation is acceptance of an imperial past.

As you cross through the massive horseshoe of the Forbidden City’s main entrance, pass through the Gate of Supreme Harmony and enter the stone enclosures of the vast courtyard beyond, you feel you are stepping into some inscrutable puzzle, picking your way to the heart of a place that has been pickled in 10,000 years of tradition. Every intricate detail is invested with symbolic importance. Every aspect of life was endowed with a ritualistic power.

Together they evoked the divinity of the emperors who presided as the Sons of Heaven. You stand in the gilded prison of the concubines who, stripped naked and depilated, would be presented to their masters wrapped up in a cloak. You inhabit the realm of the eunuchs, the emasculated but often extremely influential palace supervisors who would preserve their mummified appendages so that, after death, they might be buried as whole men once more.

And yet, somehow, the closer you draw the more elusive it becomes. This was a world, after all, in which the emperor was protected from the prying eyes of the masses, in which layers of mystery preserved a sense of his power. The presence of ancient China appears to evaporate even as you approach it. As you reach great throne ensconced in the Palace of Heavenly Purity, you find only fellow gawpers, hear only the braying of tour guides’ megaphones.

For me, this sense of absence was only further exaggerated by the privilege of being allowed into a closed section of the palace. In the Study of Pure Fragrance, where once the emperor would have relaxed with tea brewed from melted mountain snow, I sat alone and in peace for a precious half hour. I watched the slow seeping of shadows across stonework, listened to the scuttle of a dry windblown leaf, glimpsed a bird as it crossed a square of sky high above me, heard the echo of the footsteps that hurried across a distant courtyard. The place seemed to be haunted by its own emptiness.

And perhaps this is the truth of the Chinese puzzle. There is a mystery at its heart. Attempting to solve it is like peeling the onion. The essence of the emperor did not reside within the inner man but within the layers upon layers of symbolism that endowed his life with significance, within the myriad roles that he fulfilled in order to bind the multifarious peoples of his vast kingdom together.

And it seems to me, so far, that this is pretty much true also of modern-day China — except layer after layer of revelation have been replaced by layer upon layer of obfuscation, of contradiction and strange juxtaposition. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems: which means that nothing is fixed — except an utter fascination.

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