I’d made my travel plans based around the Chinese expression “Above, there is Heaven; here on earth, there is Su-Hang”, meaning the cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou. The former, a half-hour bullet train ride west from Shanghai, is near the southern end of the Great Canal, a system of waterways that stretches some 1,100 miles between Beijing and Hangzhou, which stands on the Quintang River, 100 miles southwest of Shanghai. The region is cross-hatched with hundreds of canals once busy with punts, junks and barges but now given over to touristic “ancient villages” such as Wuzhen, Zhouzhuang and Xitang.

The best kind of travel is like time travel — one foot in an outlandish past; the other in a strange and alien future. China was the perfect place to find such temporal flux. It is simultaneously calligraphy and texting, bullet trains and iron roosters, AI and hand tools, skyscrapers and temples, pit latrines and singing loos.

The modern city of Suzhou in eastern China

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An old-new village in the Shanghai suburbs

The place where I was staying was like that — new and ancient. My villa, along with 23 others, once formed a rural village in Fujian province further down the eastern coast. The buildings, as well as some 10,000 camphor trees, were uprooted and moved 430 miles north to the outskirts of Shanghai where, in a great example of the Chinese proclivity to “repair old to look old”, they were reconstructed as the Amanyangyun hotel. The luxury hotel group imbued them with the most luxurious modernities: heated swimming pools, art galleries and gas fireplaces. Still, a lot of the old world remains, in the smart tunics worn by the staff, the pedal bikes, the stone teahouse and the spa, where you can get beaten to a raggedy pulp with oak and eucalyptus. The temple of learning, the Nan Shufang, smelt like grilled yams and offered calligraphy classes and music lessons on the seven-stringed guqin. The hullaballoo of urban China felt very far away indeed, despite being just beyond the hotel gate.

From Shanghai northwest to Suzhou and another bucolic setting. Suzhou is a city known for its elaborately manicured gardens. The hotels too — the Hanyu Garden Reserve, on the shores of Lake Taihu, was like a classic Jiangnan courtyard, full of low pavilions, carved wood, calligraphy and flowing water.

A room at the luxurious Amanyangyun hotel

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My visit to China fell during the Qingming Festival, a spring holiday for visiting and cleaning the graves of ancestors. “Do you know why Shanghai people come to Suzhou for Qingming?” my host-guide, Mrs Yang, asked over lunch. “Much, much cheaper to bury the dead here!” It was some kind of local joke, but I was too dazed by the catfish stomach and toadstool soup she pushed upon me to overthink it.

The next day Mrs Yang offered to drive me to Xishan Island. “Suzhou is the back garden of Shanghai, and Xishan is the back garden of Suzhou. Very popular,” she said. We had only 15 miles to travel, but with bad traffic it took a staggering three hours by car to reach the ancient village of Mingyuewan, a place of winding alleys and watery channels where the doors were hung with sprigs of wormwood and spring onion — a ritual to protect the house within from spirits.

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The canal-laden cities of Suzhou to Hangzhou

From Suzhou I travelled south by taxi through an archaic countryside filled with men and women bent at the waist, flinging mattocks in vegetable fields squared off by bamboo fencing. In the water towns of Lili, Nanxun and Xiaoshe, boatmen propelled flat-bottomed skiffs along canals festooned with oblong lamps and willow trees.

Even Hangzhou, a city of more than 12 million and capital of Zhejiang province, felt on the edge of the past. Stand on the banks of West Lake, block out the Starbucks, the app-powered vending machines and the cardiogram of the city skyline and you would see a vision from antiquity: junk-like ferries on the water, the serrated blade of the Leifeng Pagoda and hundreds of women and young girls wearing beautifully embroidered traditional robes, with white-powdered cheeks and elaborately bowed updos. You can rent these costumes cheaply from streetside stalls — £30 for clothing, make-up and hair styling.

The canal in Zhouzhuang old town, Suzhou

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Had the Song dynasty poet Lin Bu looked out the window of his hermitage on Gu Shan Island in West Lake a thousand years earlier he might have seen what I did from my hotel room at Qiushui Villa: women posing with umbrellas and fans at every beautiful bridge, garden hollow and circular portals called moon gates; the sunset through clouds like piles of silver or the mountainside tea terraces lit with lantern light.

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It was spring, and the forests in the hills surrounding Hangzhou were pink with peach and cherry blossom and white with flowering hydrangeas. It was also the season of the tea harvest. Qiushui Villa organised a visit to Longjing, a nearby village known for its Dragon Well tea. With the Longjing master of tea ceremonies, Mrs Lee, I took a stroll among the rolling green bushes on the higher mountain. Women in red-and-yellow tunics and conical hats provided a dissonance of shape and colour. There were 60 of them in view, yoked with wicker baskets.

In Hangzhou I had seen tea selling for as much as £400 per pound. I asked Mrs Lee if it was always women who worked the terraces. “Yes, yes,” she said. “You need patience. Men are not patient. Men…,” she shook her hand as if ruffling the hair of a young boy. “Men do the cooking.” I had seen them, in courtyards and the streets, standing over large metal woks, stirring tea leaves by hand, often with an ashy cigarette drooping from their bottom lip.

Extending my stay in Hangzhou I moved from West Lake to the Xixi Wetland National Park, an inner-city expanse of water and boggy islands. I spent three nights in the park, at the Muh Shoou Xixi Hotel, a modish complex of water and glass with an excellent restaurant that sources ingredients such as lotus root, bamboo shoots and osmanthus, plus shellfish from the surrounding swamps. The wetland retains a ragged, primitive edge and was, until 2000, the domain of farmers and fishermen who angled with cormorants. Many of those former residents now work as taxi-boat drivers, canal gardeners and freshwater mussel breakers, opening oysters for a few yuan to reveal the pearls within.

The restaurant at Muh Shoou Xixi Hotel sources ingredients from the surrounding swamps

The Chinese people I met had an ingrained politeness that kept them distant and no one seemed ready to discuss politics. But they were always affable and never rude, eager for a traveller to enjoy himself, and quick to offer a cigarette, a handful of sunflower seeds or a deal-sweetener: a free hair fascinator, porcelain cup or extra piece of meat. In one such instance of kindness the young man waved away my gratitude, saying: “I, too, am a traveller. I come from Sichuan province.” It was a view into the scale of the country — any discussion in China, whether on the politics, weather or food, could really be called a geography lesson.

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One day in Xixi I spent a few hours being paddled by a boatman to the Muh Shoou’s “secret spot” deep in the park, the two of us engaged in a friendly duel of Mandarin and English. The only other sounds were of the creaking oar and egrets sliding through the green water. It was another bygone scene of peace, until the man took out his phone. He asked for my number and I gave it, despite fearing that a barrage of texts would follow. Only one ever arrived: “Have a good time in China.”

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James Patterson was a guest of SLH (slh.com); Amanyangyun, which has B&B doubles from £727 (aman.com); Hanyu Garden Reserve, which has B&B doubles from £325; Qiushui Villa, which has B&B doubles from £1,204; and Muh Shoou Xixi, which has B&B doubles from £264 (hilton.com). Fly to Shanghai or Hangzhou

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