The Grand Hyatt occupies the top half of the Jin Mao Tower — the gleaming art-decoesque shaft of steel and glass, completed in 1998, that dominates the city's Pudong (east-side) skyline. It boasts the longest laundry chute in the world, the highest gym and a 33-storey atrium. And if I can risk my eyes landing on those windows for a second and look around, I have to admit it is stunning, from the antiques decorating every floor to the three-headed monster of a shower and the internet-access TV in my room — where the curtains will have to remain closed if I'm going to stay here.

Ten days back, I was flying in from London, horizontal and under a duvet in Virgin's Upper Class suite, and landing feeling ready for anything despite the eight-hour difference. Once in China it becomes obvious that for all but the most intrepid first-timer, a guided tour is almost essential. There is just too much to see, too much to absorb, in this vast country where 5,000 years of history are colliding head-on with the 21st century. Guidebooks, particularly those to Shanghai, are mainly out of date; few people speak English; and signs, except in the cities, are in Mandarin. The Beijing-based Imperial Tours, run by Guy Rubin and his wife, Nancy, specialises in luxury guided tours for groups and individuals. Having met at Beijing University in 1997 and after two years of acting as unpaid hosts and guides to a growing flood of friends and acquaintances, they decided to put their knowledge and expertise to work.

Our tour of four cities — Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin and Shanghai — is seamlessly planned. We turn up, as if by magic, in all the right places at just the right time, always accompanied by local experts. Our foray to the Great Wall is a spectacular success: by driving to Jinshanling, that little bit further from Beijing than most tourists venture, we have an entire stretch — winding dragonlike from horizon to horizon through misty hills — to ourselves, with lunch laid on starched white tablecloths on one of the great watchtowers.

Two days later, after an internal flight to Xi'an and a night at the Sheraton — and while the hordes of mainly Japanese tourists are still in bed — we have a private view of another wonder of the eastern world: the terracotta warriors. These larger-than-lifesize figures, each modelled on an individual soldier, were created 2,200 years ago to guard the tomb of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Today, in vast hangars built to protect them, they seem to be marching like dusty ghosts out of the soft red soil that covered them until a farmer, Mr Yang, found them while sinking a well in 1974. Today Mr Yang sits puffing away at a long ivory pipe in the souvenir shop. Having been taught to write his name "artistically", his reward is a job signing guidebooks.

After a short flight south, we check into the perfectly named Paradise at Yangshuo, nestling among lush, tooth-shaped green hills outside Guilin. Here we float on bamboo rafts past cormorant-fishermen in coolie hats and sleek, grey-brown water buffalo, standing knee-deep to drink between ploughing shifts.

In our short time in China we have consumed a staggering eight lunches and nine dinners. There was a 10-course banquet at Beijing's China Club: a 17th-century palace, converted into a restaurant 45 years ago and now owned by the entrepreneur David Tang. After a performance by red-robed, cartwheeling, metal-bar-breaking Shaolin monks (one of Imperial Tours' little surprises), we were led into the lantern-lit interior to be served shark-fin soup in a papaya, and peking duck, by the same waitress who regularly served Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping. Then there was the glorious anarchy of the Green T House in Beijing, with its 30ft dining table, around which our chairs with their 10ft-high backs formed a virtual cage, penetrated with difficulty by the waiters. Succulent, slow-baked leg of lamb is a speciality of one of Shanghai's hottest tables, the Conranesque M on the Bund, with its balcony overlooking the lights along the waterfront, beside the restored deco building where Armani recently set up shop.

China is shopping heaven, and Shanghai must be the shopping junkie's drug of choice. There's the Nanjing road, China's Golden Mile (said to be visited by 2½m people a day) for department stores and foreign brands, or the exotic boutiques of Zin Tian Di, for exquisite scarves and jewellery; and Jooi Design for cashmere and silk bed covers at a tiny fraction of the price they sell for at the V&A. Bargaining in markets and less upscale shops quickly becomes second nature (aim for a third of the asking price).

"To get rich is glorious," Deng Xiaoping declared in the late 1970s, and nobody took that more to heart than the Shanghainese. The city, known as the Whore of the East in the 1920s when she seduced the world's riffraff with her drugs, vice and prostitution, is reborn today as the Big Apple of the East: the buzz is almost palpable. A wave of multistorey developments has swept away all but a few of the yellowing mock-Tudor blocks of colonial days, and decimated the crowded old longtan with their washing lines draped across dark alleyways.

The mile-long Bund, on the Huangpu river's west bank, still retains its famous string of temples to trade and banking, but since 1990 some 6,000 buildings of over 10 storeys have shot up in the city, in all sorts of head-turning shapes, some disturbingly lopsided, others with holes through them; one topped with a giant crown, others with needle-sharp spires or UFO-style saucer-shaped roofs. A high-level expressway snakes around and across the city; bridges and tunnels and an extensive metro crisscross the river; and the fastest train in the world, the Maglev (magnetic elevation), whizzes you across 30 kilometres in seven minutes to Pudong airport.

Above it all, the elegant pagoda-like pinnacle of the Jin Mao Tower reigns supreme. And after three nights in Room 6017, though I still haven't parted the curtains, my knees no longer turn to jelly when the lift shoots me up here at an ear-popping 1.3 floors a second. After a couple of glasses of champagne, sitting with my back to the windows, I've even managed a banquet on the 88th floor. And I've swum, all alone, in a palatial pool on the 57th. On my last morning, I think the time has come to open those curtains. I draw them aside, sit back in the armchair and take in that magnificent view.

Imperial Tours offer a similar 13-night tour of China (Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin, Shanghai) which costs from £3,246, including accommodation in five-star hotels, all internal flights, all meals, tour-guide services and entrance fees to tourist sites. International flights are not included. For information or to book, visit www.imperialtours.net or tel: 001 888 888 1970. Virgin flights to Shanghai start at £594.90 return