GREAT LEAPS FORWARD MY CHINA

My first memories of China are of climbing the Yellow Mountains in 1979. I was 24, and filled with an enormous sense of being Chinese. I made the trip with a friend called Edmund Ho - now Governor of Macau - and his family: we were given the red-carpet treatment.

Yet a lot of my friends didn't want to visit China at that time because of the Communist regime; my brother didn't come to my wedding in 1983 in Beijing because he was afraid. The country had been trauma-tised by Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward and his disastrous Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until the Gang of Four was purged that China began to pick herself up in the 1980s and the 1990s.

But they say that if you haven't been to the Yellow Mountains you haven't been to China and I wanted to go more than anything.

In those days, you had to use the equivalent of sherpas to climb the mountains. It was a hard slog. As we made our way to the top, I was struck by the slow pace of peasant life and the air of tranquillity. From the summit I took in one of the most beautiful views I've ever seen: an ocean of clouds and pine trees lining the ridges of the range. It looked like a classical Chinese painting. It was tremendous, and afterwards I just wanted to become a Chinese monk. Today, you can take a cable car up the mountains and there are a lot of tourists so it's not quite the same.

I knew that without living in China, I would not be able to speak with any authority on the country, so I was determined to live in Beijing, at least for a short time, and moved there in the 1980s. I was lucky to be introduced to the president of the city's university, who gave me the chance to teach philosophy and English to the first batch of PhD students in China.

Of course, China has opened up and changed dramatically in the past 20 years. The concept of "incentive" has changed its society. Under Communism's grip, there was no room for incentive, so there was nothing to work towards. Now, for the first time in a long time, Chinese people have an aim in life.

The world places great emphasis on brands, so it's only fitting that emerging China should have her own. I started the Shanghai Tang, a global Chinese clothing company, in 1994. If it has acted as a small catalyst for that change, then I feel I have done something to contribute. I have no doubt that while young people in China prefer Western items such as jeans and T-shirts, they will discover their own Chinese identity sometime during the next 10 to 15 years.

I love going to all the old places in China where they have visibly preserved history, not only architecture, but our traditions. The canal villages around Shanghai, which flourished during the Ming and early Qing dynasties, remain a favourite haunt. One canal town, Zhao Zhang, built during the Ming dynasty, with Ming bridges and Ming shops, was due to be knocked down and mod-ernised. But a friend of mine persuaded the mayor to renovate it using traditional craftsmanship. Since then tourism has quadrupled. It's a pretty place with cobbled streets, like a little Venice. There are now two or three such towns near Shanghai.

I also love to walk along Shanghai's Bund, the embankment of the Whampoa River lined with old buildings. Here the colonists watched their ships come in with their illicit goods. The Peace Hotel, also on the Bund, is one of the most tremendous Art Deco hotels in the world. I like listening to the jazz band that has played in the hotel cafe every night for the past 40 years. The average age of the performers is around 84. After 11pm their sons take over. I also never miss the opportunity to visit the Huxinting Tea House, just outside Yuyuan Gardens. It's the oldest tea house in China, dating back to 1784.

In Beijing I like to stroll around Tiananmen Square at night. It's very eerie. I also like to look at the embalmment of Mao Zedong in his mausoleum. Another must is to take a walk in the Forbidden City. Go there an hour before sunset and you'll avoid the crowds. And take a look at the most perfect building in the world: the 500- year-old Temple of Heavenly Peace in southwestern Beijing.

When I'm in Beijing, I always dine at the China Club, the private members' club I started in a 15th-century palace courtyard which originally was used to hide princes' concubines and later housed a restaurant frequented by Deng Xiaoping. In 1983, when Margaret Thatcher announced the return of Hong Kong to China, there was much debate about whether it would be a good or a bad thing. Refugee tycoons who had escaped from China to Hong Kong and become extremely rich were very apprehensive. They faced going back under Communist rule. It's incredible to think that in those days these people were very much part of the British system; they wanted the Brits to hang on to Hong Kong. Now everybody talks about China and sneers at Britain.

The irony is that the British tried to preserve more Chinese things than the Chinese themselves did, because the British had a sense of history. They wanted the rickshaws and the traditional celebrations; they were concerned about the Chinese way of life. After 1997, absurdly, the first thing the new Chinese chief executive of Hong Kong, Tung Chee Hwa, wanted to take pride in was the building of the wretched Disneyland. Controversy still reigns over the demolition of the clock tower at the Star Ferry complex: it was almost like taking Big Ben down. Since 1997 there has been a blatant disregard of heritage. Even Mong Kok's famous night market - with its bright lights, illicit traders and street food stalls - is being cleared to make way for shopping malls and their gleaming marble and slabs of concrete.