Twenty-five years after his first visit, JOHN CRAVEN returns to find a different country where ancient sites and natural wonders sit alongside soaring skyscrapers

IT WAS a moment to remember: coming face to face with a giant panda high in the misty mountains of south-west China's Sichuan province where they have struggled to survive for three million years.

Our first panda certainly wasn't a giant though. It was in fact tiny and just a few weeks old, a cute black and white bundle of fluff lying in an incubator. We were at the Bifengxia (Chinese for Green Peak Canyon) Panda Research Centre, the only place in the world where you can see the creatures in their natural habitat.

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I was on a 15-night tour of the country leading a 32-strong group aged from late 20s to early 80s and revisiting many of the places I had first seen as a BBC TV reporter 25 years ago.

Back then I was the first Western TV journalist allowed to visit the country's pioneering panda research centre 100 miles away at Wolong. There were only five pandas, all kept in bleak cages and in bad shape after being rescued from starvation.

I had been planning to revisit Wolong when Sichuan was devastated by the 2008 earthquake.

Amazingly only one of the pandas died in that disaster and the rest were transferred to Bifengxia.

Today Bifengxia is home to about 70 pandas, all snoozing or eating and living in large enclosures in the next best thing to freedom. Only an estimated 1,600 pandas are left in the wild.

Some of our group were so enthralled with the animals they paid £100 each to play with a young panda for five minutes and have their photographs taken.

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They were on cloud nine for the rest of the trip.

During my last visit in 1985 the country was recovering from the social and economic impact of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had agreed Britain would hand over Hong Kong in 1997 and Wham! became the first foreign pop group to tour the country.

Arriving back in Beijing nowadays (it was still called Peking in the days of my earlier visit) was my first big shock. The city seemed about 10 times larger and packed with skyscrapers and the carts and bicycles of 1985 had made way for cars.

The Forbidden City was still timeless though and as I stood among thousands of tourists and pondered the power of ancient emperors, someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked what picture had won the Countryfile photographic competition.

Throughout the trip our guide was Link Lee, a knowledgeable, funny man who opened our eyes to the intricacies of his beloved country with his clarion call of "Do I make myself clear?" He always did.

We were in Beijing during a national holiday so there were an extra nine million people thronging the streets.

However, because we had started early our coach missed the worst of the city's notorious rush hour, sped past the huge commercial centre (not there 25 years ago) and arrived at the Great Wall before the hawkers had opened up shop.

We could take photographs of each other on one of the world's great wonders without anyone in the background.

We took the same early bird approach when we flew to Xi'an to visit the Terracotta Warriors that for 2,700 years have guarded the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang. The warriors had been discovered in 1975 when a farmer fell through a hole in the ground and came face to face with two of them.

LAST FORWARD to 2010 and we wandered almost alone past the ranks of life-sized clay soldiers and horses in the vast new visitor complex where impressive visual effects tell the amazing story of this unearthly army. Another army, this time of real soldiers, 100,000 strong and hidden from sight, guarded our next destination.

The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is the world's biggest hydroelectric scheme and powers China's second city of Shanghai many miles downstream.

Should the dam be breached, Shanghai would be washed away, hence the soldiers.

As we cruised through the gorges we learned the Yangtze had risen 70 metres since it was blocked, displacing more than a million people. It also put an end to the livelihood of the trackers, teams of naked men had hauled boats over the river's rocks and shallows for generations. Today they row tourists up a tributary and demonstrate their old hauling techniques (but with their clothes on!).

One of the biggest changes I noticed was the explosion of Western-style fast food outlets, restaurants and coffee bars with more than 100 Starbucks in Shanghai alone.

A QUARTER of a century ago Chinese food was the only option and on this visit we were treated to delicious, traditional-style banquets twice a day, although by the end of the trip many of us were yearning for the tastes of home and slipped out for pizza.
In 1991 President Deng Xiaoping stood on the Bund riverbank in Shanghai and pointed to the farmland on the other side. "We must do something there, " he said.

So they did. Now the skyline glows with the lights of skyscrapers including the world's third tallest building, the Shanghai World Financial Center.

Yet a country which can achieve that can also find time to celebrate the birth of twin pandas at Bifengxia.

China will not allow its national symbol to follow the dodo to extinction but many of the country's other distinguishing features may not be so easily protected.

If you want to see the real China before it changes even more, don't wait 25 years.

GETTING THERE:
Wendy Wu Tours (0844 875 2433/ wendywutours.co.uk) offers a 20-day China Delights tour including visits to historic sights from Guilin to the Great Wall from £1,990pp. Price includes flights from Heathrow to Shanghai and return from Beijing.

Emirates (0844 800 2777/emirates.com/uk) offers return flights from various UK airports to Beijing via Dubai from £535.