As China stiffens its sinews for the Olympics, Adrian Cooper discovers an altogether quieter, more contemplative side to the city of Beijing.

On an inherited Welsh dresser in our kitchen, wedged behind month-old birthday cards and chipped teacups, there is an old willow pattern plate gathering dust. Printed on the surface is a story: three small figures are crossing a bridge, walking towards a double-tiered pavilion: two birds are flying in the porcelain sky, wings snapping the wind. Thomas Turner of Caughley, Shropshire, started producing transfer-prints like these in 1775, feeding a growing English market for objets chinois. Soon, the nation’s habit of morning bowls of beer was replaced by drinking Canton tea, slurped down in cups which bore these vignettes of Oriental idyll.

The willow pattern was – and still is – the most common stock-print, and the porcelain story it depicts belongs to Koong-se and Chang, whose star-cross’d tragedy bears an uncanny resemblance to Europe’s own great drama of doomed love, Romeo and Juliet. In truth, the plate on our kitchen dresser probably tells me more about 16th-century globalisation than Chinese literature, for Koong-se and Chang’s love story was more likely adapted – if not entirely invented – to suit the English palette.

But agrarian fertility myths have long been at the core of Chinese literature, art and philosophy. One of the fourth-century chu ci, or Songs of Chu poems, tells the story of a king who was cured by a shaman. Chanting descriptions of an orchid-scented garden, the healer managed to lure the monarch from death with images of a beautiful princess, sitting, waiting for the king in a shaded nook.

In fact, you could say Beijing itself was originally built for ceremonies and rituals dedicated to nature. This is a place described in the 8th-century book Rituals of Zhou, a kind of handbook for ancient Chinese principles of design, as the place ‘where Heaven and Earth are in perfect accord, where the four seasons come together, where the winds and the rains gather’.

I first met the birdmen of Ritan Gongyuan (Ritan Park) in digital attachments my sister sent weekly by email. Every other morning, she wrote, a group of them would arrive near her office and hang brass cages on the branches of a magnolia tree. They would stand there for hours, talking about the world, pausing to sip tea from plastic flasks.

When I first arrive in Beijing, smudged by a 10-hour flight, I head for the corner of Ritan where the caged birds sing.

Walking through the park, I am immediately struck by the vibrancy. I pass groups of people fan-dancing, sword-dancing, flying kites. I watch children scooping petals into their pockets like handfuls of fresh snow. Turning off the main path, I notice a group of men standing on a circle of stones, surrounded by showers of ornamental cherry blossom.

Their conversation pauses as I edge towards them. I introduce myself as well I can, using an English-Mandarin dictionary. Guo Yong – a school teacher, I later find out – smiles at my poor effort, then tells me he can speak a little English. He invites me forward to meet a finch with an injured wing, opening the cage so the fragile bird can hop onto his finger.

‘He likes to sing with his friends,’ Guo Yong says. And in reply, the bird starts chirping its tiny heart out.

Beijing’s emperors were responsible for keeping the harvests both regular and bounteous – they were, after all, meant to be the earthly servants of Heaven. If crops failed, the reputation of emperors failed. Emperor Chongzhen – the last of the Ming rulers – hanged himself from a tree when a severe drought struck Beijing in the 17th century. Today, streams of people still search for the tree the Emperor used as his gallows, following multi-coloured flags and tannoys to see where the great Ming Dynasty also died.

This morbid attraction is not the only reason to visit Jingshan Gongyuan, and the following morning, following a winding path through lush bamboos, I climb to the centre of the park. Once the highest peak in Beijing, Jingshan (or Mountain with a Beautiful View) was shaped from the rubble of sacked Yuan palaces and mud dug from the moat that surrounds the Forbidden City. Built in 1420, under the instruction of Emperor Jong Le, Jingshan was meant to suppress any bad fate that the previous, defeated dynasty might cause. The Emperor also raised deer here and was said to feast atop Jingshan every ninth day of the ninth lunar month, with an entourage of concubines, queens, and eunuchs.

The Pavilion of Everlasting Spring, atop Jingshan, is where one of Beijing’s earliest photographic prints, in albumen silver, was captured by Felice Beato in 1860. From here I can hear more song rising from the canopy of green below – not birdsong this time, but a human version. I decide to clamber down, and soon find myself in a sea of voices and violas.

The activity in the park is overwhelming. There is ballroom dancing, Chinese opera societies, Mao-era choirs. Sitting on a grassy verge, listening to the cacophony, a young couple break from chatting to ask if I can take their photograph. I agree, but only if they tell me how it is possible to fall in love surrounded by all these people.

Home is just as crowded,’ Xiao Ma says. ‘There aren’t so many places we can go.’ Yong Wang looks up from fiddling with his digital camera: ‘And there’s not much time for us to be together. We make the best of an opportunity.’

During the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) an unprecedented number of gardens were constructed. After his long tours to southern China, Emperor Qianlong ordered a number of miniature versions of what he had seen to be built in Yuanmingyuan (the Garden of Perfect Brightness). ‘Garden scenes’, wrote French painter and missionary Jean Denis Attiret in 1743, ‘are placed with so much art, that they would take it to be a work of nature.’

Engaged by Emperor Qianlong as a painter, Attiret, along with fellow Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, were the only Europeans invited to design a ‘scene’ inside Yuanmingyuan. It was a great honour, and the European Jesuits built baroque buildings for the Emperor, as well as European flowerbeds and a maze of elaborate fountains.

Yuanmingyuan is now surrounded by a north-west Beijing suburb, between the fourth and fifth ring roads. The 3,000 buildings which once stood inside were destroyed in 1860 – an Anglo-French force stormed the gardens during the Second Opium War.

Today, there is no fan-dancing or singing to be found here. ‘This is a place of mourning,’ one woman told me. Here, people step quietly amid the reminders of conflict.

The history of Beijing’s gardens, like the story of this city itself, is a cycle of destruction and renewal. During a China sojourn in the 1920s, the English author Dorothy Graham noted that gardens were ‘a refuge from the noisiness of the world’ – an observation which is just as true in 2008. Beijing’s parks are many things. They offer people a sensual narrative and are more like miniature paintings, filled with layers of symbolism, evoking different moods as you move through. Gardens are also a sanctuary for Beijingers, who are living through an era defined by change. Above all, though, the city gardens are a thriving communal space, where the crafts of diversion – a quick gossip and swig of tea – are as serious as the arts of calligraphy, tai chi or mahjong.

Near the ruins of Yuanmingyuan is Yiheyuan – better known as the Summer Palace. The lake here, called Kunming Hu, is a ‘borrowed scene’ from near Xian in Shanxi province: the water is lined by weeping willows and flowering peaches, while wisterias and lilacs – typical of gardens in northern China – grow among scattered rock-eries. Across the water, two silhouetted pagodas shimmer in the haze of Beijing’s western mountains. For a moment this landscape transports me away from Beijing, carrying me to a distant Yangtze marshland.

At the lake edge, a boy of five or six runs circles in a windless afternoon, trying to force his kite into the air. Entranced by the dips of fabric, I do not notice when the boy’s father decides to sit next to me on a small boulder. After an exchange of smiles, he starts talking about kite flying and why he wants his son to play outdoors. ‘A philosopher called Zhuangzi’, the father adds, ‘once dreamt he was a butterfly. Then, when he woke, he wasn’t sure if he was a man still dreaming, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.’

At Seventeen-Arched Bridge, which links Kunming Hu to Nanhu island, a photographer sets the legs of a wooden tripod. Old and cumbersome, his camera only uses large, single plates. In the time it takes him to prepare a frame, the stones of the bridge turn pink in the setting sun. Other photographers arrive at his side, hovering about him like lake mosquitoes, their digital flashes blasting white, capturing a hundred frames to his none.

Dazzled by the cameras, my eyes move towards the bridge. A man is flying a long, purple kite – he too has attracted a crowd, all heads snapped skyward. A young couple walk arm-in-arm passed the kite-flyer, heading towards Nanhu Island. I hope her father does not find them, I start thinking, remembering the story on the plate back home: those blue, entwined birds flying above an island: Koong-se and Chang, the human couple transformed into birds, taking to the sky because their love is forbidden on earth.

Four of the best Beijing parks

Jingshan

Over the weekend Jingshan is alive with opera societies, martial arts, ballroom dancing and musical groups. As well as climbing to the top of Jingshan to absorb the atmosphere, it is worth visiting the original tree peony garden. The nearest subway stop is Tian’anmen Xi.

Yuanmingyuan

The Garden of Perfect

Brightness was once the most important in Beijing.
Today it has a more sombre ambience than most other gardens in the city. It is situated beyond the fourth ring road, near Beijing and Qinghua Universities and you can either make the journey by taxi or take the overland train to Wudaokou station.
Yiheyuan

Yiheyuan (Garden of the Preservation of Harmony) is dominated by Kunming lake and Wanshou Shan (Longevity Hill). Yiheyuan is just to the south of Yuanmingyuan.

Tiantan

Set in 270 hectares of park, the temple complex at the heart of Tiantan was built between 1406 and 1420. The park is planted with over 1,000 species of trees. The most striking sight is the avenue of gingko leading to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest. Tiantan is best accessed by taxi.

Where to stay

The Westin Beijing Financial Street
9B Financial Street Xicheng District Beijing Tel: (+86) 10 6606 8866 www.starwoodhotels.com

The St Regis
Beijing 21 Jianguomenwai Dajie Beijing Tel: (+86) 10 6460 6688 www.starwoodhotels.com

The Kerry
Centre Hotel No1 Guanghua Road Beijing Tel: (+86) 10 6561 8833 www.shangri-la.com