There are a number of unexpected hurdles an international clarsach player has to overcome. Keeping a check on her haggis consumption is top of Katie Targett-Adams’s list. The 27-year-old musician, who hopes to do for the Celtic harp what Vanessa Mae did for the violin, has faced more haggis than a packer at McSweens. “Burns Night now sprawls over the whole of January and half of February,” she says. “There was one week when I ate haggis for six dinners out of seven.”

But with the clapshot has come a taste of success so sweet it could strip enamel. In the five years since a chance call from VisitScotland encouraged her to dust down an instrument she thought she had cast off with her old school tie, Targett-Adams has become one of Scotland’s most exciting crossover artists, with three CDs and a DVD to her name.

A singer/songwriter who mixes traditional Scottish folk with contemporary pieces, Targett-Adams has performed for everybody from the Queen to Jeb Bush. Her appeal is eclectic. She played at the launch of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and was booked for Scotland’s first gay marriage ceremony. She is the first artist to have been offered a festival fringe show at Edinburgh Castle and has toured in America, France, Spain and Germany.

But it is in China that she is making that elusive transition from success to phenomenon. Last week, she embarked on a month-long tour of the Far East. It’s her fourth visit in four years. Her break came in 2003 when the Chinese cultural ambassador to London saw her performing at Stirling Castle and invited her to the International Folk Arts Festival in Nanning. When she got there, she found herself playing to an audience of 10,000 shouting “We love you” and writing her name in light sabres in the air.

“It was absolutely overwhelming,” she says. “Everybody wanted to touch me and hand me flowers. On one occasion, I sat down to tune my harp and when I looked up there were 40 photographers snapping away.”

Now she regularly plays to Chinese audiences of up to 35,000 and has become a cultural ambassador for Scotland. At 5ft 10in and the inheritor of her mother’s model looks, it’s not just her playing that sets her audiences reeling.

Her celebrity status in China is such that when she accepted an offer of help with her make-up, seven stylists, a photographer and a vidoegrapher turned up at her hotel room. An invitation to lunch with the mayor of Baoshan district, Shanghai, turned out to be a 50-course affair, which was filmed for a 45-minute documentary.

“I’m always amazed at the crowds and they’re always finding new ways to appreciate me,” she says. “Every time I’m bowled over because I just can’t predict them. Everything is on a huge scale.”

Nobody who knows Targett-Adams is surprised at her success or the ease with which she has handled it. On paper, her life has been a gilded one. Her mother, Andrea, is a former society model. Her father, Duncan, known as Gene, is a Cambridge-educated property developer whose brother is Phil Manzanera, the guitarist with Roxy Music. The family lived in Edinburgh’s prestigious Heriot Row and Targett-Adams attended St George’s School, where she was deputy head girl, before studying Spanish and German at Oxford University. She was the first Junior Masterchef champion and turned down a job offer to cook for Terence Conran to concentrate on her music.

Her upbringing has taught her independence and assertiveness and her demeanour is of one of poise and self-confidence. Nevertheless she is wary about whom she trusts and while she has some help, she does her own management and bookings. “I’m in control of my own career and I’m happy about that,” she says.

When she was starting out, she wrote to Mel Bush, the classical crossover promoter behind Vanessa Mae and the quartet Bond, whose raunchy exploitation of their sexuality has caused outrage among classical music purists. She says her experience with Bush wasn’t for her.

“In the end, I just thought, ‘I can’t do this’,” she said.

“I could see a little bit of logic in it but it got to the point where my mind just wouldn’t let me.”

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