The after-effects of Maoist policies meant that as late as the 1980s the availability of good ingredients in China was pretty poor, leading to a miserably low standard of food served outside the highest-class hotels and restaurants. Now, in much of the country, market stalls are swamped under the weight of fresh produce, and the only problem is choosing what it is you'd like to eat and how you'd like it cooked.

Rice in various forms - grain, noodles, or as dumpling wrappers - is the staple, apart from in the north and far west of the country, where the colder climate is better suited to growing wheat and millet. Wheat noodles are also widely popular, usually fried or served in a soup; keep an eye out for lamian - literally "pulled noodles" - a Muslim treat made as you wait by pulling out ribbons of dough between outstretched arms, and serving them in a spicy soup. Meat is held to be a generally invigorating substance and, ideally, forms the backbone of any meal - serving a pure meat dish is the height of hospitality. Pork is the yardstick, except in areas with a strong Muslim tradition where it's replaced with mutton or beef. Fowl is also considered good for you, especially in old age or convalescence, and was quite a luxury in the past (chicken was once the most expensive meat in Beijing), though today most rural people in central and southern China seem to own a couple of hens, and the countryside is littered with duck farms. Fish and seafood are very highly regarded and can be extraordinarily expensive - partly because local pollution means that they have to be imported - as are rarer game meats. Dog ("warming"), cat ("cooling"), and snake (a general panacea depending on which part you consume) are also considered delicacies in south and southwestern China, and few Chinese tourists visit these areas without trying them.

Eggs - duck, chicken or quail - are a popular nationwide snack, often flavoured by hard-boiling in a mixture of tea, soy sauce and star anise. There's also the so-called "thousand-year" variety, preserved for a few months in ash and straw - they look gruesome, with translucent brown albumen and green yolks, but actually have a delicate, alkaline flavour. Dairy products serve very limited purposes in China. Goat cheese is eaten in parts of Yunnan, but milk and yoghurt are considered fit foods only for children and are not used in cooking.

Vegetables accompany nearly every Chinese meal, used in most cases to balance tastes and textures of meat, but also appearing as dishes in their own right. There's a wide range from water chestnuts, lettuce and radish, to "glass" noodles made out of pea starch, and tofu , pressed curd made from boiled soya beans - though in parts of the country the selection can be very slim. Seasonal availability is backed by a huge variety of dried , salted and pickled ingredients - mushrooms, seaweed, greens and bamboo shoots - which, along with preserved meats and seafood , often characterize local cooking styles. China also has an enormous assortment of regional fruit , great to clean the palate or fill a space between meals.

When it finally comes to preparing and cooking these goodies, be aware that there's far more on offer than simply chopping everything into small pieces and stir-frying them. A huge number of spices are used for their health-giving properties, to mask undesirable flavours or provide a background taste. Marinating removes blood - repugnant to the Chinese - and tenderizes and freshens the flavour of meats; chicken and fish are often cooked whole, though they may be dismembered before serving. Several cooking methods can be used within a single dish to maximize textures or flavours, including crisping by deep frying in flour or a batter; steaming , which can highlight an ingredient's subtler flavours; boiling and blanching , usually to firm meat as a precursor to other cooking methods; and slow cooking in a rich stock.

Vegetarianism has been practised for almost two thousand years in China for both religious and philosophical reasons, and its practitioners have included historical figures such as Cao Cao, the famous Three Kingdoms' warlord, and the pious sixth-century emperor Wu. Vegetarian cooking takes at least three recognized forms: plain vegetable dishes, commonly served at home or in ordinary restaurants; imitation meat dishes derived from Qing court cuisine, which use gluten, beancurd and potato to mimic the natural attributes of meat, fowl and fish; and Buddhist cooking , which avoids onions, ginger, garlic and other spices considered stimulating.

Having said all this, strict vegetarians visiting China will find their options limited. Vegetables might be considered intrinsically healthy, but the Chinese also believe that they lack any physically fortifying properties, and vegetarian diets are unusual except for religious reasons. There's also a stigma of poverty attached to not eating meat, and as a foreigner no one can understand why, when you could clearly afford to gorge yourself on a regular basis, you don't want it. Although you can get vegetable dishes everywhere, be aware that cooking fat and stocks in the average dining room are of animal origins. If you really want to be sure that you are being served nothing of animal origin tell your waiter that you are a Buddhist.

Things are easiest in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, which have real vegetarian restaurants ; elsewhere, head for the nearest Buddhist temple , many of which have dining rooms open to the public at lunchtime - and even if you're not vegetarian, some serve extraordinarily good food. When ordering in these places, note that imitation meat dishes are still called by their usual name, such as West Lake fish, honey pork or roast duck.

Not surprisingly, given China's scale, there are a number of distinct regional cooking styles divided into four major traditions. Northern cookery was epitomized by the imperial court and so also became known as Mandarin or Beijing cooking, though its influences are far wider than these names suggest. A solid diet of wheat and millet buns, noodles, pancakes and dumplings help to face severe winters, accompanied by the savoury tastes of dark soy sauce and bean paste, white cabbage, onions and garlic. The north's cooking has also been influenced by neighbours and invaders: Mongols brought their hotpots and grilled and roast meats, and Muslims a taste for mutton and chicken. Combined with exotic items imported by foreign merchants and vassal embassies visiting the court, imperial kitchens turned these rather rough ingredients and cooking styles into sophisticated marvels such as Peking duck and bird's nest soup - though most people survive on soups of winter pickles, or fried summer greens eaten with a bun.

The central coast provinces produced the Eastern style , whose cooking delights in seasonal fresh seafood and river fish. Winters can still be cold and summers scorchingly hot, so dried and salted ingredients feature too, pepping up a background of rice noodles and dumplings. Based around Shanghai, eastern cuisine, as opposed to daily fare, enjoys little, delicate forms and light, fresh, sweet flavours, sometimes to the point of becoming precious - tiny meatballs are steamed in a rice coating and called "pearls", for example. The legendary story about a cook who boiled down a huge quantity of beansprouts to produce one bowl of soup containing the vegetable's essence also comes from this area.

Western China is dominated by the boisterous cooking of Sichuan , the antithesis of the eastern style. Here, there's a heavy use of chillies and pungent, constructed flavours - vegetables are concealed with "fish-flavoured" sauce, and even normally bland tofu is given enough spices to lift the top off your head. Yet there are still subtleties to enjoy in a cuisine which uses dried orange peel, aniseed, ginger and spring onions, and the cooking methods themselves - such as dry frying and smoking - are refreshingly unusual.

Southern China is fertile and subtropical, a land of year-round plenty. When people say that southerners - specifically the Cantonese - will eat anything, they really mean it: fish maw, snake liver, dog and guinea pig are some of the more unusual dishes here, strange even to other Chinese; but there's also a huge consumption of fruit and vegetables, fish and shellfish. Typically, the demand is for extremely fresh ingredients, quickly cooked and only lightly seasoned, though the south is also home to that famous mainstay of Chinese restaurants overseas, sweet-and-sour sauce. The tradition of dim sum - "little eats" - reached its pinnacle here, too, where a morning meal of tiny flavoured buns, dumplings and pancakes is washed down with copious tea, satisfying the Chinese liking for a varied assortment of small dishes. Nowadays dim sum - pronounced dian xin outside the south - is eaten all over China, but southern restaurants still have the best selection.

Hong Kong basically takes the best of Chinese cooking as its own, though heavily biased towards the southern style, while in Macau you'll get the chance to try the region's unique mix of Portuguese and Asian food, known as Macanese.

Breakfast is not a big event by Chinese standards, more something to line the stomach for a few hours. Much of the country is content with a bowl of zhou (rice porridge) or sweetened soya milk, flavoured with pickles and accompanied by a heavy, plain bun or fried bread stick. Another favourite is a plain soup with rice noodles and perhaps a little meat. Most places also have countless small, early opening snack stalls , usually located around markets, train and bus stations. Here you'll get ravioli-like jiaozi or shuijiao , served fried or boiled; stuffed buns; grilled chicken wings; kebabs; spiced noodles; baked yams and potatoes; boiled eggs; grilled corn and countless local treats. Traditionally, these have taken the place of more familiar Western-style fast food , though some cities now have home-grown copies of burger bars and fried chicken joints, almost always with names and signs in English.

There's a fair amount of Western and international food available in China, though supply and quality varies from place to place. Hong Kong has the best range, with some excellent restaurants covering everything from French to Vietnamese cuisine, and there are a number of hotel restaurants specializing in Western food in Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. Elsewhere, areas like Yangshuo in Guangxi, which see a huge number of foreigners, and tourist accommodation in big cities, often serve "Western-style" meals such as pizza, pancakes, steak and salads - the latter two often available as part of a special deal for around ¥25 - some of it very good indeed. Where available, your best bets for something familiar are the genuine McDonald's, KFC - the current favourite - and Pizza Hut restaurants which have appeared over the last few years. Here you can be assured of products which are the same the world over.

While small noodle shops and foodstalls around train and bus stations have flexible hours, always keep an eye on restaurant opening times , which, even in the biggest cities, tend to be early and short. By 6am breakfast is usually well under way, and by 9am will have wound up. Get up late and you'll have to join the first sitting for lunch at 11am or so, leaving you plenty of time to work up an appetite for the evening meal around 5pm. An hour later you'd be lucky to get a table in some places, and by 9pm the staff will be yawning and sweeping the debris off the tables around your ankles.

Hotel dining rooms can be very flash affairs, with the most upmarket serving a range of foreign and regional Chinese food at ruinous cost, though more average establishments can often be extremely good value. Advantages include the possibility that staff may speak English, or that they might offer a set menu of small local dishes. Standard restaurants are often divided into two or three floors: the first will offer a canteen-like choice, with dishes sometimes out on display for you to point at, or with the selection scrawled illegibly on strips of paper or a board hung on the wall. You buy chits from a cashier for what you want, which you exchange at the kitchen hatch for your food and sit down at large communal tables or benches. Upstairs will be pricier and have more formal dining arrangements, with waitress service and a written menu, while further floors (if they have them) are generally reserved for banquet parties or foreign tour groups and are unlikely to seat individuals.

The cheapest stalls and canteens are necessarily basic, with simple food which is often much better than you'd expect from the furnishings. Though foreigners are generally given disposable chopsticks, it's probably worth buying your own set in case these aren't available - washing up frequently involves rinsing everything in a bucket of grey water on the floor and leaving it to dry on the pavement.

In itself, getting fed is never difficult as everyone wants your custom. Walk past anywhere that sells cooked food and you'll be hailed by cries of chi fan - basically, "come and eat!" Pointing is all that's required at street stalls and small restaurants, where the ingredients are displayed out the front in buckets, bundles and cages. In bigger places you'll sometimes be escorted through to the kitchen to make your choice. One thing to watch out for here is getting the idea across when you want different items cooked together - for instance, you might end up with separate plates of nuts, meat, and vegetables when you thought you'd ordered a single dish of chicken with cashews and green peppers. Another drawback to this method is that unless you say how you want your food prepared it inevitably arrives stir-fried and you'll soon get bored unless you experiment with steamed or braised dishes. Menus , where available, are often more of an indication of what's on offer than a definitive list, so don't be afraid to ask for a missing favourite. English menu translations also tend to omit things that the Chinese consider might be unpalatable to foreigners.

When you enter a proper restaurant you'll be quickly escorted to a chair. In all but the cheapest places, tea, pickles and nuts immediately follow, to take the edge off your hunger while you order. The only tableware provided is a spoon, bowl, and a pair of chopsticks , and at this point the Chinese will ask for a flask of boiling water and a bowl to wash it all in - not usually necessary, but something of a ritual. To handle chopsticks, hold one halfway along its length like a pencil, then slide the other underneath and use them as an extension of your fingers to pick up the food - except for rice, which is shovelled in with the bowl up against your lips.

When ordering , unless eating a one-dish meal like Peking duck or a hotpot, try to select items with a range of tastes and textures - perhaps some seafood, meat and chicken, each cooked in a different manner; it's also usual to include a soup. In cheap places, servings of noodles or rice are huge, but as they are considered stomach fillers, quantities decline the more upmarket you go. Unless in an ornate form, rice never features at banquets - asking for it would imply that the host hadn't provided you with enough food. Dishes are all served at once, placed in the middle of the table for diners to share; eat fairly slowly, taking time to talk between helping yourself. With some fowl dishes you can crunch up the smaller bones, but anything else is spat out on to the tablecloth or floor, more or less discreetly depending on the establishment - watch what others are doing. Soups tend to be bland and are consumed last to wash the meal down, the liquid slurped from a spoon or the bowl once the noodles, vegetables or meat in it have been picked out and eaten. When you've finished your meal, rest your chopsticks together across the top of your bowl. After eating the Chinese don't hang around to talk over drinks as in the West, but get up straight away and leave.

In canteens you'll pay up front, while at restaurants you ask for the bill and pay either the waiter or at the front till. Tipping is not expected in mainland China.

Tea was introduced into China from India around 1800 years ago, and was originally drunk for medicinal reasons. Although its health properties are still important, and some food halls sell nourishing or stimulating varieties by the bowlful, over the centuries a whole social culture has sprung up around this beverage, spawning tea houses which once held the same place in Chinese society that the local pub or bar does in the West. Plantations of neat rows of low bushes adorn hillsides across southern China, while the brew is enthusiastically consumed from the highlands of Tibet - where it's mixed with barley meal and butter - to every restaurant and household between Hong Kong and Beijing.

Chinese tea comes in black, red, green and flower-scented varieties , depending on how it's picked and processed. Some regional kinds, such as pu'er from Yunnan and Fujian's oolong, are highly sought after - if you like the local style, head for the nearest market and stock up. Though never drunk with milk and only very rarely with sugar, the method of serving tea also varies from place to place: sometimes it comes in huge mugs with a lid, elsewhere in dainty cups served from a miniature pot. When drinking in company, it's polite to top up others' cups before your own, whenever they become empty; if someone does this for you, lightly tap your first two fingers on the table to show your thanks. If you've had enough, leave your cup full, and in a restaurant take the lid off or turn it over if you want the pot refilled during the meal.

It's also worth trying some Muslim tea during your stay in China. This involves dried fruit, nuts, seeds, crystallized sugar and tea heaped into a cup with the remaining space filled with hot water, poured with panache from an immensely long-spouted copper kettle. Also known as Eight Treasures Tea , it's becoming widely available in upmarket restaurants everywhere, and is sometimes sold in packets from street stalls.

The popularity of beer - pijiu - in China rivals that of tea, and, for men, is the preferred mealtime beverage (drinking alcohol in public is considered improper for Chinese women, though not for foreigners). The first brewery was set up in the northeastern port of Qingdao by the Germans in the nineteenth century, and now, though the Tsingtao label is widely available, just about every province produces at least one brand of four percent Pilsner. Sold in litre bottles, it's always drinkable, often pretty good, and is actually cheaper than bottled water. Draught beer is now becoming popular across the country.

Watch out for the term " wine ", which doesn't usually carry the conventional meaning. China does actually have a couple of commercial vineyards producing the mediocre Great Wall and Dynasty labels, more of a status symbol rather than an attempt to rival Western growers. Far better are the local pressings in Xinjiang Province, where the population of Middle Eastern descent takes its grapes seriously. More often, however, "wine" denotes spirits , made from rice ( mijiu), sorghum or millet ( baijiu). Serving spirits to guests is a sign of hospitality, and they're always used for toasting at banquets. Again, local home-made varieties can be quite good, while the mainstream brands - especially the expensive, nationally famous Moutai and Wuliangye - are pretty vile to the Western palate. Imported spirits , particularly whiskies, are sold in large department stores and in tourist hotel bars, but are always very expensive.

Water is easily available in China, though it's best not to drink what comes out of the tap. Boiled water is always on hand in hotels and trains, either provided in large vacuum flasks or an urn, and you can buy bottled spring water at station stalls and supermarkets - read the labels and you'll see some unusual rare minerals (such as radon) listed, which you'd probably rather know weren't in there.

Canned products, usually sold unchilled, include various lemonades and colas, and the national sporting drink Jinlibao , an orange and honey confection which most foreigners find over sweet. Fruit juices can be unusual and refreshing, however, flavoured with chunks of lychee, lotus and water chestnuts. Coffee is grown and drunk in Yunnan and Hainan, and available as instant powder elsewhere - Hainan actually produces a nice instant blend with coconut essence. Milk is generally sold in powder form as baby food, though there seems to be some campaign in progress to promote its health qualities for invalids and the elderly, and you sometimes find cartons of UHT in supermarket fridges. Sweetened yoghurt drinks, available all over the country in little packs of six, are a popular treat for children, though their high sugar content won't do your teeth much good on a regular basis.