The late English poet Philip Larkin wrote "The Importance of Elsewhere" whilst living and working across the Irish Sea in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The sentiment of the poem is one that many will associate with. It was with this in mind that I bought my train ticket for Yangzhou in neighboring Jiangsu Province.

"Ah, yes! Yangshuo," my friends nodded sagely, thinking I was meaning that well-known backpacker paradise near Guilin in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. "It's very beautiful."

Brows then knitted when I explained that I was actually going to Yangzhou, west of Nanjing, by train over the Spring Festival.

Worse still, I was going alone and my Mandarin, as they were aware, was some way short of fluent. Confusion followed by polite laughter and the conversations invariably ground to a halt, save for the odd: "Why?"

My criteria was simple: I wanted to stay in China; I didn't want to fly; nor did I want to spend days on a train.

I wanted a genuine, modern, urban Chinese experience away from the Western conveniences of Shanghai. I did, however, require a decent hotel room with a Western convenience.

In my native Scotland, Chinese people can be found in the most remote corners and often with powers of English that, if anything, are actually worse than my current powers of Mandarin. The Chinese in Scotland, as elsewhere, sprinkle a little bit of magic wherever they are to be found. I hoped to discover how a lone Scot would fair in upcountry China.

Yangzhou is an ancient city of more than four million denizens and situated where the mighty Yangtze River is crossed by the longest and oldest canal in the world, the aptly named Grand Canal.

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