Winter is harsh in northern China. Long gone are the heights of summer, whiling away the days on the shores of the city lakes, eating freshly cooked street food with a cold beer and great company. Autumn is but a blip in the calendar, perhaps a day, a week or two at most, and then winter drops a long, harsh, steady stream of arctic wind, snow, and temperatures so low you barely make it out and back alive. As the cities’ power stations fire up to 11, so does the pollution descend across the entire northern countryside – clouds spanning thousands of miles from the eastern seaboard to deserts far away in the west. A heavy, sickening, choking mixture of coal and petrol and diesel and smoke and chemicals and everything else burning for as far as the eye can see cooks up a dense grey veil to cover the city, and with it heralds the beginning of another bleak winter.

An enclave in north-east Beijing, 798 district is a bastion of expression and freedom in an otherwise barren  landscape. Wandering the exhibitions, the galleries and work spaces, climbing the rusting steel gas works and peering through mouldy glass windows, peaking behind closed doors trying to take in the art all around, one gets the distinct feeling this enclave is something of a gated compound keeping things in.

Rising high above Tiananmen, the dominant Red Walls of Beijing’s most revered Hutong keep out the prying eyes of passers-by. The once bustling inner courtyards link one another through ancient stone arches, each emerging to wide open spaces filled with an emptiness of biblical proportions.

80 percent of domestic Chinese tourists are in 20 percent of the places, states the guide book, and a trip to China supports this rather intense fact. The famous destinations in the guide books are notoriously crowded as internal tourism has grown rapidly over the past 15 years. However, in order to escape the suffocating crowds, a short walk away from the main site can often offer surprisingly quick relief.