On September 25, 1660, in his now famous diary, British naval administrator Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) wrote, “To the office, where... we talked together of the interest of this kingdom to have peace with Spain and a war with France and Holland... And afterwards, I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before, and went away.”

Not long after this, tee (tea) and the porcelain crockery that goes with it (china), was the very height of fashion in England.

In 1848, Scottish botanist Robert Fortune, (1812-1880) made two trips to China disguised in Mandarin dress, to obtain (“steal”) a superior variant of tea from rural China for the East India Company. From these specimens, vast plantations of tea were set up in India, Burma, what is now Sri Lanka and East Africa. Through these plantations, the British Empire thrived and a tea-drinking culture was established.

Walking through the streets of the Dong Cheng district in the centre of Beijing in October, I found it hard to associate this crowded city and its choking pollution with a dainty little cup of tea.

Beijing, also known by its Latin derivative, Peking, means “northern capital,” a term coined during the Ming dynasty at the start of the 15th century.

The streets have a dull industrial feel, and I was dismayed to find that the food is not the Chinese food that’s well-known in the rest of the world. In Beijing, it is not branded, it is not hyped, it is not fine dining, it is just food — no fuss, no frills.

It wasn’t until I entered the preserved heritage of the Forbidden City, where Communist China and Imperial China seem separated by nothing more than a 8.9m-high perimeter wall, that I got a feel of the China that gave the world dainty porcelain.

The contrast between the two worlds is breathtaking. Built on 72 hectares, with 980 surviving buildings, the Forbidden City was the imperial palace from the time of the the Ming dynasty (which started in 1368) to the Qing dynasty (which ended in 1912, when it was replaced by the Republic of China.)

The southern gate, called the Tiananmen Gate (or Gate Of Heavenly Peace) leads to Tiananmen Square, where Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

To the west of Tiananmen Square is an opera house — the ultra-modern 2.7-billion-yuan National Centre for Performing Arts. Here, there is a sense of the past, present and future China converging.

At the opera house, with theatre critics from around the world who were attending the 27th World Congress of the International Association of Theatre Critics, I watched Donizetti’s Don Pascuale, a production with a mixed cast of Chinese and Italian opera singers.

Earlier that day, we had visited the Summer Palace, which is in the Haidian district to the northwest of Dong Cheng. Covering an area of more than 290 hectares, it took almost the entire day to walk around the grounds. We were then shuttled to the opera house, looking like scruffy backpackers amid the well-groomed opera lovers as we had no time to change.

The Summer Palace, which was originally called the Garden of Clear Ripples, is a spectacle of oriental landscape architecture — an array of beautiful gardens, and man-made lakes, bridges and pavilions. The largest lake is the Kunming, which lies across the foot of the Hill of Longevity — given this name by the Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796), in honour of his mother’s 60th birthday.

Being at the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City is like being transported to another place and time. Here, I experienced not just the China that gave the world the tea and the porcelain tea-set, but the China that inspired landscaped gardens in Europe; the China of Zhen He (or Cheng Ho), whose maritime expeditions of the early 1400s brought him to the Kenyan coast.

On returning home, it occurred to me that Kenyans, in a tea-drinking nation, see China’s influence in the new roads and highways. I acquired a porcelain tea set so that every time I have a cup I’ll think of that great country.