See China, speak Mandarin

My itinerary, drawn up by the travel company Bales Worldwide with the warning that I was about to get “very tired indeed”, went like this: storm into Beijing, visit the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, sprint up the Great Wall, meet several thousand terracotta warriors in Xian, hammer over to Shanghai, then on to Guilin to sail down the Li River, and stagger home via Hong Kong. Along the way, I planned to test my Mandarin, or what remains of it.