The week of 16 August I visited many different parts of China.

I started in Urumqi where my wife and I attended the wedding of a Chinese-Norwegian couple who met while studying in Auckland. It was a remarkable gathering of three nations, and held as it was high up in the mountains south of the city, the setting carried something of the flavour of New Zealand and Norway, as well as of China.

This was my first visit to Xinjiang ever,so I was especially pleased that the day following the wedding we were able totravel to Turpan, to see the sights of that oasis city, one of the hottest and certainly the lowest in China.

The dominant nationality in Turpan is Uygur, the titular nationality of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, which is marking its 60th anniversary this year. I was not on an official visit to the region but I did have some interesting discussions with local people. There are well known tensions between the various nationalities, with security measures to match, although these are not prominent so far as casual visitors are concerned.

From Urumqi I flew to Xi'an and from therepaid a brief visit to friends in Ruicheng in southern Shanxi province.

I visited two famous sites: the Yong Le Gong, a Taoist temple moved to its current site when the neighbouring Yellow River was dammed, with remarkable frescoes from the 14th century; and Da Yu Du,the place where Yu the Great, the tamer of the waters, is commemorated. Water today is pumped up from the Huang He to irrigate the fields above. All a reminder that this is the ancient heartland of China.

I travelled back to Xi'an to join the Leadership Network Hui of the Asia New Zealand Foundation, the organisation I headed before coming back to China. The Leadership Network is a group of 300-400 New Zealanders with an interest in or working in Asia who share their experiences with each other, and with fellow New Zealanders.

I spoke to the group about New Zealand'srelations with China, and was able to join them on a visit to the terracottawarriors, the buried army of the Qin emperor. I had last visited there over 10 years ago. Returning on this occasion I began tounderstand why Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit wereso popular in China.

My last stop was Yan'an, four hours drive north of Xi'an, and famous in modern Chinese history as the place where Mao Zedong and his colleagues took refuge after the Long March and during the anti-Japanese war.

The city government was generous enough to take me to all the sites where Mao and other famous Chinese leaders had lived, and the impressive museum, with a special exhibition of foreign friends of China. There I found images of New Zealander James Bertram, who was amongst the first foreign journalists to visit Yan'an at that time.

China is a large and diverse country, but it is not often within one week that it is possible to visit five such different places as I did.