We fly in to Jiangsu capital Nanjing from Yunnan and immediately hit the road to Yangzhou, once the cultural and economic powerhouse of this region of China. One of the province's celebrated water towns, Yangzhou has the Yangtze River flowing just to the south and the Grand Canal – the longest canal in the world at nearly 1,800km, of which about half is still navigable today – skirts it to the east. The Grand Canal is also the world’s oldest canal, the first section dating back 2,500 years. A network of canals runs through the city as well as the picturesque Slender West Lake.

First stop is the Tianning Temple. Inside the temple complex is the Yangzhou Museum with its memorial hall dedicated to Marco Polo. He is said to have spent 17 years in China in the late 13th Century and in his journal claims he was governor of Yangzhou for three years, a claim disputed by many scholars today. The museum charts his travels and includes a bronze sculpture of a lion, which was a gift from the city of Venice. We head on to He Garden, a classic Chinese garden built by a late Qing Dynasty official. Jiangsu is famous for its traditional Chinese gardens, and this is a wonderful collection of buildings and pavilions with ornate tiled roofs, decorated corridors, exquisite courtyards, pools and doorways of all different shapes. I am filmed walking through several of them – it feels a bit like being on Playschool, the TV programme where viewers had to guess whether a story would be through the round, arched or square window.

The cuisine of this region, Huiyang cuisine, is one of the four most famous Chinese cuisine styles. It is subtle and more delicately-flavoured than China's other cuisines. I discover that one of my favourite rice dishes back in England – Yung Chow fried rice – originates from Yangzhou and is simply a corruption of its name. We film in a restaurant in an exclusive guest house where a typical local banquet, called a honglou feast, has been laid out. The food on the table is as artistic as the wonderful jade pictures on the walls, depicting scenes from the ancient book which inspired Huiyang cuisine.  We get up very early the next morning to film breakfast being prepared by chefs in another restaurant. Breakfast is very important to Yangzhou people. Known as zao cha, meaning breakfast tea, it is part of their social life. Some arrive at 5am and stay for several hours. Breakfast involves savouring many different types of steamed dumplings, or jaozi, all beautifully wrapped and presented. There is even a soup dumpling, which you have to pick up by hand and nibble a hole so you can drink the soup inside. With food this wonderful I am amazed I see so few overweight Chinese people. During the whole trip I see only a couple of people I would regard as fat. America eat your heart out.

Eating one regional delicacy in Jiangsu turned into an ordeal for me. Freshwater crab is served whole and without any special implements. My chopsticks prove useless, so I use a toothpick to tease the meat out of the claws and shell. Meanwhile everyone else simply crushes the claws with their teeth and chews them to suck the meat out. They stare at me in amusement because I am making such a meal of it. We have crab several more times, and I finally learn to eat it like my hosts and colleagues. More of an ordeal to stomach is another meal, of pig's brain and solidified duck blood cooked in a hotpot. Once more I make everyone laugh by guessing that the duck blood is coloured tofu, then showing my disgust when I find out what it really is. Strange how it suddenly starts appearing on the table regularly after that. Thankfully the local speciality dishes from one lunch are not served again. Perhaps a better description of them is garden produce, as they consist of sparrow, hedgehog and frog among others. I can just imagine the chef chasing all creatures great and small around the restaurant garden, serving up whatever he manages to catch.

We take a cruise along Yangzhou's canals to Slender West Lake aboard a dragon boat called Qianlong, named after the Qing emperor who toured along the same route on his visits to Yangzhou. Our boat has its own claim to fame, as it was used by Chinese leaders including Yangzhou’s own, premier Jiang Zemin, when they visited. The gloom of the mist, through which the sun is barely visible, adds a mysterious atmosphere to the lake and surrounding park. The main feature of the lake is the three-arched Five Pavilion Bridge, which dates back to 1757. It is said that local divers used to put fish on the hook of Emperor Qianlong when he fished in the lake so that he would look favourably on his visits and continue to pour funds into the city.

Jiangsu is famous for its art and crafts. Yangzhou's speciality is red-coloured lacquerware, often inlaid with gold, ivory and precious stones. We visit the Yangzhou Arts and Crafts Museum where some of the large pots and intricate paintings on display have an incredible 500 layers and took 10 people three years to carve the detail. In the workshop I watch master carver Rubai Zhao carving a detailed wooden ink slab which has already taken him five months and will need another month to finish. He has been a master carver for over 40 years, having been a paint carver for 20 years. I admire his skill, but perhaps I admire his patience even more.

The drive to Wuxi, another canal town famous for its art, involves crossing the mighty Yangtze River by ferry. The mist-shrouded river is wide and very busy, a shuttle of ferries criss-crossing in between the stream of cargo vessels which loom out of the murk and chug past. It’s a wonder they all manage to avoid each other. The other passengers seem bemused as we film and photograph them, the ferry, the ships steaming along the river and each other, like duellists armed with lenses. It helps to make the 15-minute crossing fly by.

Wuxi is known for its colourful A Fu figurines, notably a chubby little boy and girl symbolising luck. We go to the Wuxi Clay Figurines Museum and Research Institute where they are made. The special clay used is only found in a 30cm thick layer and doesn’t need to be fired. The figurines only need to dry naturally before they are painted. The museum is along a wide street with a canal flowing through the middle of it. Chinese people seem happy to live their lives on show to everyone and this canal-side street is a prime example of that. A lady is making a quilt by hand on the cobbles of the street, completely oblivious to the cyclists who bustle past or me with my cameras. Across a bridge a man is operating a spinning wheel. I also photograph a woman on a bike with her baby in a wire shopping basket behind her saddle. He doesn’t seem to mind being scrunched up in his makeshift child seat and hangs on tightly as his mother shakily cycles off along the cobbles. Several pairs of knickers are hanging on coathangers from trees by the canal, their owner obviously unashamed of what passers by think about her underwear. A songbird in a bamboo cage hangs from another tree. Its owner, an old man, is sat on a bamboo chair below, a flask of tea on a small table by his side. These are just snapshots of scenes you see all over China. 

We film some ancient canals including the original section of the Grand Canal. Some men are flying kites from an old hump-back bridge, the string of one running between overhead electric cables. They are still flying their kites as we leave, so they are either very adept at missing the wires or very fortunate not to have been electrocuted. The evening rush hour is in full swing by now, and hordes of people are rushing along the narrow streets on bicycles, tricycles and mopeds. It is all so frenetic I don’t know which way to look, and more than once my interpreter, Lillian, has to grab me and pull me back to safety as I am just about to be run down by speeding cyclists.

Wuxi is also home to the CCTV Film and TV Studio, China’s version of Universal Studios. A number of Chinese films and TV series have been filmed here. Like its American counterparts, this complex is divided into zones. We watch a live show featuring a flying kung fu fight sequence in one of them. The show itself is entertaining and funny at times - intentionally so, I think. The aerial scenes could have come from any Chinese martial arts film, with the hero, heroine and baddie locking sword blades, somersaulting and spinning, then leaping past each other in thin air while brandishing their swords. All of it on cables suspended high above the ground and positioned with pulleys and wires by unseen helpers. It only needed Jackie Chan to make it feel like being in the front row of a cinema. Another show features two opposing armies clashing in an arena with lots of high-speed acrobatics and weapon-flailing on horseback.

We board another boat in picturesque Turtle's Head Park and set sail on Taihu Lake. Actually I have to set the sails. It is a replica of a three-masted fishing junk and I am roped into hoisting up the expansive mainsail for the cameras. I then have to don a fisherman's garb of coolie hat and palm frond cape so I can be filmed manning the helm. Except that it is fake. The real ship's wheel is in the aft wheelhouse, and with lots of barge traffic heading for Wuxi and the Grand Canal to avoid I'm sure they wouldn't let me touch that with a barge pole.

One of Jiangsu's most amazing sights is the 88m tall Lingshan Buddha, further round the lake in the  Lingshan Buddhist resort . It is the tallest bronze Buddha statue in the world, but that is not what we go there to see. Ethereal music is wafting through the air, and after convincing a jobsworth guard we are there legitimately we race in the opposite direction to the statue. A crowd is transfixed by a huge bronze column in a marble-edged pond, the top of the column shaped like a giant lotus flower. Its petals are slowly opening to reveal a shiny bronze statue of a young Buddha, small by comparison to the main statue but still 7.2m high. As the leaves continue to open the statue slowly revolves. Fountains dance around the base of the bronze lotus, and as the music rises to a crescendo water jets spout from the mouths of nine bronze dragons set around the pond’s perimeter. They douse the figure, now fully revealed, in a scene meant to symbolise Buddha’s birth. Once it has completed a full circle, the little Buddha retreats back inside the petals until it is once again hidden from view. The fountains abate and the crowd melts away, the bizarre but powerful spectacle over until the next day. Everything in Lingshan is on an immense scale, but we are in a rush so have no time to see the giant statue or any of the other sights which have attracted 10 million visitors since the resort opened seven years ago. We miss the 1,000-year-old Xiangfu Temple, likewise the biggest bell south of the Yangtze River, the biggest tripod urn in China, the largest bronze palm – hand, not tree – in the world and the Museum of Buddhist Culture.

Yixing is famous for its purple clay teapots. They have been made in the town since the Ming Dynasty and the many artists drawn there over the centuries have helped turn the humble teapot into a highly-prized work of art. Examples by noted artists can fetch tens of thousands of dollars. At the ceramics workshop of master potter Xiutang Xu I watch craftsmen hand-making teapots as well as a tableau of lifesize figures in the purple clay, then Mr Xu shows me his magnificent 2.8m sculpture of a warrior figure - the largest sculpture by anyone in the material.

Among Suzhou's many ancient tourist sights is Tiger Hill, which is surmounted by China's very own Leaning Tower. The top of the seven-storey 1,100-year-old brick Cloud Rock Pagoda began tilting 400 years ago and is now more than two metres off centre. But it is the classic Chinese gardens which are the city's main claim to fame, four of them having UNESCO World Heritage status. Hundreds of private gardens were built over the centuries, most by wealthy officials who fell from favour with the imperial court. We film in two, the 500-year-old Humble Administrator's Garden and the tiny but beautiful Master of the Nets Garden. The gardens' creators were aiming to present them as landscape paintings using rockeries and water with bridges, corridors and pavilions. The many doorways, shaped windows and latticed wood supports of the buildings help focus the eyes on particular scenes, creating their own little framed landscapes. Some of the scenery is obvious, other aspects are hidden, the still water creating mirror images of some scenes. The mirror effect is amplified in the Master of the Nets Garden, as we visit at night when the outlines of the pavilions and buildings are brightly illuminated. We are there to watch performances of the local opera, called kunqun, and musical performances called pingtan. I expect to have to sit through hours of shrill, ear-piercing singing. But it is a series of cameo performances, each only about five minutes long. As each one finishes the audience moves off to the next pavilion for the following one. There is traditional opera as well as musical exhibitions of instruments including a piba (like a lute), guzheng (a Chinese plucked zither), sanxian (a three-stringed banjo) and dizi (bamboo flute).

Suzhou is also famed for its silk and embroidery, and at the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute I watch some girls embroidering large and intricate silk panels stretched out on wooden frames like oversized artists’ easels. One is working on an abstract of vibrant blues and greens which, when finished, would then be sold in the institute’s shop for 100,000 yuan, or over £7,000. It sounds a lot, until I realise that the price represents a year's labour and the institute's mark-up. The most expensive work took three years and is on sale for 240,000 yuan, just over £17,000. Special double-sided panels can only be done by a few masters. There are several examples on show, the patterns different on either side although the outlines must be the same shape. One is of Prince Charles on one side and Diana on the other. Neither looks like the real thing, but I diplomatically praise their likenesses when they are pointed out to me.

I get the chance to try some Chinese as we leave Suzhou. "Women milu le ma?" Or in English: "Are we lost?" The answer is yes. Our driver gets totally lost after stopping by the Grand Canal for us to film and take pictures of all the barges. I am amazed at how incredibly busy it is. The canal is like an aquatic motorway. Instead of the convoys of lorries there is a procession of industrial-age marine beauty queens, each propelled by as many as five or six raucous engines across the stern and all of them belching out plumes of steam and smoke. Barges are mainly used to transport building materials and coal along the Grand Canal. Empty ones sit high above the waterline like paper boats, but the fully-laden ones are so low in the water that it seems as though a single ripple would be enough to flood over the hull and sink them.

In Nanjing we go to what was once the city’s red light district, Fuzi Miao. We have dinner in a former brothel on the bank of the Qinhuai River, and are shown down steep stairs to a terrace overlooking the river where the ladies plied their wares. Dinner consists of 16 courses of local dimsum, called Qinhuai xiaochi, plus six to eight side dishes. The meal reminds me of Noah’s Ark, the dishes coming in two by two. The courses are served in pairs, one dry and one moist. I can’t keep up. Every time I finish one they bring two more, so that I end up with half a dozen in front of me and admit defeat. Alongside a bridge over the river is a screen wall of dragons dating back 500 years, yet the pink and green neon lights decorating it make it look more like a funfair attraction. At least it is in keeping with the rest of the area, which is Nanjing's main amusement zone. Even the Confucian Fuzi Miao temple across a lake by the screen wall looks tacky, the curved outlines of its roofs picked out by strings of lights.

Despite the initial impressions I like Nanjing. It is a clean city with wide roads and a modern heart of soaring offices, hotels and shopping centres. Yet it has managed to preserve much of its rich history. Nanjing is one of China’s six ancient capitals. It was the country’s capital for a time during the Ming Dynasty before the third Ming emperor, Yongle, decamped to Beijing. It was also briefly the capital in the early 20th Century, when the Provisional Republican Government of China which ended the country’s long dynastic era was set up by revolutionary hero Sun Yatsen, regarded as the father of modern China. After his death in 1925 a huge mausoleum complex was built to honour his wish to be buried in Nanjing. Today it is a source of pilgrimage for Chinese and overseas visitors alike, and we go there to film. The tomb is an impressive Ming-style building at the top of a colossal stone stairway of 392 steps, 323m long and 70m wide. Streams of people make their way up the steps to pay respects to China’s revolutionary founder including one group bearing a huge Communist Party flag. I watch and photograph them until the fluttering flag reaches the mighty blue-topped mausoleum at the top.

Nanjing was surrounded by one of the longest city walls ever built and two-thirds of its still stands today. We visit  the 600-year-old Zhonghua Gate, one of several of the original 13 Ming city gates still standing and regarded as the grandest in China. We walk through the arched gateways below the gate, then up the sweeping ramp past mannequin soldiers standing guard with flags to the grassy expanse at the top where several people are flying kites. We also visit the tomb of Hongwu, the first Ming emperor. Beyond marble bridges swathed in yellow and red flowers a tree-lined avenue leads to a red-walled imperial gate topped by yellow tiles and mythical creatures at the corners. The central arched doorway has two massive, bronze-studded red doors sporting brass lion knockers. The actual tomb is in an as yet unexcavated vault beneath a huge earth mound surrounded by an imposing wall.

Balmy Garden, in the centre of the city, is a classical Ming garden. It housed the opulent Mansion of the Heavenly King, built after the Taiping rebellion in the mid 19th Century on the foundations of a former Ming Dynasty palace. But it burnt down in the fall of the Taiping and what exists now is a reconstruction of some rooms and halls. Some of the buildings were used as the president’s residence and office during the time of Sun Yatsen’s government and again during the Kuomintang rule up to 1949. The tranquillity of the garden is in stark contrast to the violence which surrounded the Taiping. Rebel leader Hong Xiuquan was a religious zealot who, according to the Taiping creed, was the brother of Jesus sent down to earth to exterminate demons personified by the Qing Dynasty. The rebels slaughtered the Manchu population after Nanjing fell, ruling it with a puritanical Christian grip for 11 years. The city was retaken by the Qing army in 1864. None of the 100,000 fanatical Taiping rebels surrendered to the invading force, preferring instead to take their lives in a mass suicide.

We drive to the Yangtze River to film the grandiose Yangtze River Bridge. It is immense when you are up close, the elevated railway towering overhead on giant concrete legs with the roadway above that. A series of rectangular openings at the base of the legs makes it look like a gigantic version of the long, straight corridors in China’s ancient imperial palaces, receding far into the distance. This is monumental Communist architecture at its most impressive. An elevator takes visitors up to the gallery next to one of the river-side piers. The view is fabulous. On the landward side the railway and road come together to form the double-deck bridge, the point where they meet marked by a pair of statues of heroic workers and soldiers on the parapets either side of the roadway. In the other direction the bridge marches across the wide expanse of the Yangtze, a succession of cargo boats of all shapes and sizes plying up and down waters made golden by the misty setting sun.

On our last morning in Nanjing we visit the Brocade Museum and Research Institute. The brocade is silk woven with colourful threads, sometimes even gold and silver. It is one of the most famous brocades in China and dates back some 700 years to the Mongol rule of the Yuan Dynasty. The weaving room is like an industrial revolution era factory in England. A row of large wooden platform looms are operated by two people, one at the bottom and the other sat high up in the leviathan's frame. The lower operators weave the coloured weft threads across the single-coloured warp strands. It looks almost as if they are organists, their feet operating bamboo rods like the pedals of a Wurlitzer and the multi-coloured bobbins laid out in front like organ keys. The weavers can only produce 5-6cm of brocade length a day. As a result it is very expensive. The cheapest ones cost 2,000 yuan, about £145, per metre while ones made with gold or peacock feathers cost up to three times that. It can also only be made by hand, as they have not perfected machine-made brocade yet. I hope they never do. In earlier times it could only be used to make formal imperial robes or casual dress for the emperor or imperial family members, and the weavers were all men as women were regarded as inferior and could not touch the material. Now women can work as weavers and wear the brocade, a point proven by a fashion show of fabulous brocade dresses just for our benefit.

At dinner one night with officials from Jiangsu's tourism bureau my colleagues decide I should have a Chinese name, a tradition for foreigners spending any length of time in the country. They settle on one which they say represents my role as “ambassador” and a cultural bridge between England and China. The name they give me is Pi Ying Hua, which translates literally as Peter England China. It is an honour which makes me feel as though I have been accepted as one of them, instead of being an outsider.

Next stop: Tongli.