Earlier this year, in a rather bizarre linguistic experiment, I attempted to learn Mandarin Chinese, a language with 6,000 written characters, four distinct tones and multiple opportunities for self-humiliation. The results, Times readers may recall, were patchy.

This summer I attempted something similar in travel terms by visiting as many of the key sights in China in as brief a time as possible, exactly one year ahead of the Olympics: a sort of marathon sprint.

It takes at least a year of full-time study to master rudimentary Mandarin; I attempted this in two weeks. It requires more than one lifetime to explore China thoroughly: I was planning to do it in little over a week. Thus the two experiments had much in common, being quite impossible, hugely enjoyable and slightly mad.

My itinerary, drawn up by the travel company Bales Worldwide with the warning that I was about to get “very tired indeed”, went like this: storm into Beijing, visit the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, sprint up the Great Wall, meet several thousand terracotta warriors in Xian, hammer over to Shanghai, then on to Guilin to sail down the Li River, and stagger home via Hong Kong. Along the way, I planned to test my Mandarin, or what remains of it.

Insane as this sounds, it is probably not so far removed from the sort of itinerary many sports fans will attempt when they converge on Beijing for the Games, intent on seeing a little of China at the same time.

Standing in the middle of Tiananmen Square, fresh off the flight from London, but distinctly unfresh in every other way, I found myself reeling as the impressions collided. The square itself, paved, policed and almost empty; the Forbidden City ahead, with its familiar portrait of Mao, a secret citadel ancient and unchanging; and both these impressions in stark contrast to the rest of Beijing, which is transforming itself faster than any city in history.

A year before the Olympics, Beijing is a scene of roiling demolition and construction as money turns to cement in the most ambitious remodelling of a capital ever attempted. The city Mao envisaged as “a forest of chimneys” is a forest of cranes. Alongside the square gleams just one of the vast buildings marking Beijing’s transformation, the National Opera House, created by the French architect Paul Andreu, a huge gleaming oval nicknamed “the Duck Egg”.

As we crawled through the traffic from the airport, my guide reeled off the new architectural wonders of Beijing – the 91,000-seat National Stadium, with its latticework of beams; the National Aquatics Centre swathed in energy-saving bubble wrap. “All new building finished by August 8. New apartments very expensive. Too expensive for Chinese people.” House prices, now rising at 50 per cent a year, have become a staple topic of conversation.

To go from the frenzied building works into the quiet alleyways of the Forbidden City is to pass from one statement of architectural power to a very different one. Despite the teams of tourists in bright baseball caps, this sealed-off world of emperors, empresses, concubines and eunuchs surrounding the Hall of Supreme Harmony retains some of its tranquillity. Yet even here, the Olympic race is on, with some buildings cocooned in scaffolding.

“All will be ready for Olympics,” explained my guide, looking at his watch. “We must hurry.” I still don’t know if he was referring to our packed itinerary or to China’s.

The next morning, I was standing on the Great Wall, once more astonished at the scale of Chinese building, and out of breath again, not from the air, but from the effort of climbing a single section. Great Wall: Great Workout. Nobody tells you that the largest man-made structure on Earth is also a 4,000-mile StairMaster. A sign at the foot of the wall advises: “Please walk carefully on abrupt slope and dangerous way: Don’t run and pushes to pash violently and the laugh and frolic.”

Frolic? After climbing 4,782 steps on the abrupt slope and dangerous way, I was panting like an asthmatic walrus. The wall snaked away into the distance, greenery stretching on either side, like some aerial canal carved out of the sky.

Once I could speak again, I decided to test some Mandarin on an attractive young Chinese woman in a pink tracksuit. “Ni shuo Yingwén ma?” I ventured nonchalantly. (Do you speak English?) Not only did she speak English, she spoke less Chinese than I do, being Amanda Wang from Dayton, Ohio.

Feeling crushed, I took the cable car back to earth and bought lots of Red Army T-shirts and a Chinese general’s hat from the souvenir stall. Ironic iconic Communist memorabilia: Mao, how things have changed.

Twelve hours later I was gazing over rank after rank of the famous terracotta warriors, buried in the mausoleum of the first Qin emperor to march him in glory to the afterlife. Has there ever been a greater quest for immortality than these 8,000 life-size dummies, or a more fitting testament to the vanity of human power?

But it was Qin Shi Huangdi’s umbrella that most surprised me, an intricate piece of engineering that might have been made yesterday, not three centuries before Christ. This ruler left nothing to chance, including the possibility of bad weather in the afterworld. Respect.

Shanghai passed in a whirlwind of traffic and skyscrapers. I walked the waterfront Bund, ate a duck that had been prepared by angels, and had a foot massage that put me into a brief but delightful coma. There is not a moment to lose in Shanghai: the city is being torn down and rebuilt even faster, if anything, than Beijing. I sat in a café in Old Shanghai, and tried to imagine the real old Shanghai, the port where European “Shanghailanders” traded and Englishmen ran to seed and opium.

Waiting for me at Guilin airport in southern China was Mr Chang, my guide, learned, enthusiastic and astonishingly camp. He appeared to have learnt English from watching Julian Clary. He kept up a steady patter, and called me “dear” or “deary” throughout.

“Here good place to live, deary, absolutely no natural disasters. You can walk anywhere, but you utterly not have private massage otherwise you call me say, ‘Mr Chang, help come save me, dear.’ Ha ha . . .”

While Mr Chang hammed it up, I looked out on one of the most extraordinary landscapes I have ever seen, a ghostly array of conical green peaks. According to an old Chinese saying, this picturesque scenery is the “finest under heaven”.

We floated down the Li River, past bamboo groves. On either side wild goats grazed on mist-draped mountains; ancient bridges crossed streams; and steps reached down to the water, where men fished with cormorants. We might have been travelling across an old willow-pattern plate, but for a fisherman talking on his mobile phone.

Mr Chang had moved, inevitably, on to house prices. “Six years ago, dear, one car worth three houses, today one house worth five cars . . .”

After nine days, four flights and five cities, I was exhausted and exhilarated. Charging around the world’s third-largest country at breakneck speed may not be the ideal way to travel, but somehow it seemed to fit the frenetic pace of China itself as it storms ahead as an economic superpower.

Before heading home, I had a final task. It was time for one last attempt at Mandarin. At the airport I turned to Mr Chang. “ Zàijiàn,” I said. "Xièxie” (“thank-you and goodbye”).

Mr Chang looked troubled, but then suddenly brightened. “I understand, dear. You are trying to speak Chinese.”

Need to know

Bales Worldwide (0845 0570600, www.bales worldwide.com) offers an eight-night tour of China from £1,630pp. The tour is to Beijing, the Great Wall, Xian, Shanghai and Guilin. BA flights, transfers, internal flights, guides and some meals are included.

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