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Crawling out of bed on a damp October morning, in my small shared room in the Foreign Students' Building of Sichuan University. My Italian roommate, Filomena, is already up and out. Sleepily, I pull on a padded jacket and look out of the window. As usual, the sky is a muffled grey ('Sichuanese dogs bark' -- in surprise -- 'at the sun', goes the old saying). Over the wall that is supposed to keep foreign students in and curious Chinese people out, I can see a row of wutong trees and, beyond them, the Brocade River, where a cormorant fisherman is trying his luck in the murky water. His birds, their great black wings flapping, have rings around their necks. When they catch a fish too big to slide down their constricted throats, they offer it to the fisherman, who drops it into his basket, and gives them a smaller fish in exchange. I watch, captivated by yet another of the endlessly fascinating little events that mark my daily life in Chengdu.

When the cormorant fisherman has drifted past and I can no longer see his birds at work, I shower, dress, and go off in search of breakfast. I say good morning to the elderly watchman at the gate of the Foreign Students' Building, and wander out past a row of plantain trees. Students and lecturers on bicycles ride past me, ringing their bells. Laundry and birdcages hang on the balconies of the low-rise apartment blocks. Everything is softened slightly by the gentle touch of the Sichuan mist. The campus is a quiet, leafy place, an oasis of tranquillity in a city where the taxis honk their horns incessantly and the street vendors shout and clatter.

Not far away, just behind the university offices, there's a snack stall, which I can find just by following my nostrils. The heavenly scent of guo kui, twirly flatbreads stuffed with minced pork, spring onion and Sichuan pepper, drifts out across the campus. They are made by an elderly couple who don't speak much as they go about their business. The woman kneads her dough and rolls it into balls on an oiled wooden board. With the heel of her hand, she smears each ball into a long tongue of pastry which she rubs with lard and a smattering of spicily seasoned pork. Then she rolls it up, flattens it into a round and passes it to her husband. After frying them golden in oil, he tucks the guo kui under the griddle, where they bake crisp at the side of the charcoal brazier. Eaten hot, they are crunchy and chewy and savoury, and the Sichuan pepper makes your lips dance and tingle. Could there be anything more delicious for breakfast on a damp autumn day?

It wasn't food that originally lured me to go and live in China, or at least that's what I told myself. I was supposed to be researching Chinese policy on ethnic minorities. A year after my first visit to China in 1992, I had flown to Taipei for a two-month summer course in the Chinese language, and then spent a month travelling around Mainland China and Tibet. On my way home from Lhasa, I called in on the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, arriving on one of those rare, balmy days when the sun shines brightly, only slightly blurred by the perennial Sichuan haze. With me I had the crumpled namecard of a Sichuanese er hu (Chinese two-stringed violin) player called Zhou Yu, whom I had met on the streets of my hometown, Oxford, spellbinding a crowd with his melodies. 'Look me up if you ever visit Chengdu,' he had told me. So I checked into the Traffic Hotel, hired a bicycle, and went off in search of him at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music.

Zhou Yu was as warm and engaging as I had remembered. He and his exuberant wife Tao Ping, another musician, welcomed me as an old friend, and took me on a bicycle tour of the sights of the city. We went for a walk in the grounds of the poet Du Fu's 'thatched cottage', and then they invited me for lunch at a modest restaurant near the bus station. It was a single room on the ground floor of a timber-framed cottage, tiled in white like a bathroom, with a few tables and chairs and nothing to adorn the walls. Zhou Yu ordered some food, and we waited for the dishes to emerge from the tiny kitchen at the back, amid the sounds of furious sizzling. The room filled up with the most marvellous aromas.

I can still remember every detail of that delicious meal. The cold chicken tossed in a piquant dressing of soy sauce, chilli oil, and Sichuan pepper; a whole carp, braised in chilli-bean paste laced with ginger, garlic, and spring onions; pig's kidneys cut into frilly, dainty morsels and stir-fried, fast, with celery and pickled chillies. And so-called 'fish-fragrant' aubergines, one of the most scrumptious dishes I'd ever tasted: the golden, buttery fried aubergines cooked in a deep-red, spicy sauce, with no actual fish but seductive hints of sweet and sour. This was Chinese food as I had never known it before. It was a revelation.

A few months later, a colleague at the BBC suggested I apply for a British Council scholarship to study in China. She helped me devise a worthy plan to investigate Chinese policy on ethnic minorities, a subject that had interested me for some time. Filling in the scholarship form, I came up with various academically convincing reasons for basing my research in Chengdu. I wanted to avoid the expatriate centres of Beijing and Shanghai, so that I had a chance to immerse myself in Chinese life and the Chinese language -- never mind that Sichuan dialect is a notoriously distorted version of Mandarin. Then there was Sichuan's location on the fringes of Han Chinese China, near the borderlands inhabited by Tibetans, Yi, Qiang, and countless other minorities. It all sounded quite plausible. But as I filled in the boxes on the form and composed my personal declaration, I must confess that I was thinking also about sweet and spicy aubergines, of a fish lazing in chilli-bean sauce, of frilly pig's kidneys and Sichuan pepper. Fortunately, the British Council and the Chinese government agreed that Chengdu was a suitable place for me to study, and they gave me my grant, a golden ticket to explore China for a year, with no strings attached.

In the autumn of 1994, the foreign affairs office of Sichuan University held a meeting to welcome the new cohort of foreign students to Chengdu. We gathered in the main hall of the Foreign Students' Building, where a stern member of the local Public Security Bureau read us the national regulations on 'aliens', with a teacher translating into stilted English. We were told that 'subversive actitivities' would get us into trouble, and that if our offences were serious enough, we might be expelled from the country. When the policeman had finished, the teacher added that medical staff would soon be coming to the university to draw our blood, which would be tested for HIV. Given that we had all been required to have exhaustive physical examinations before entering China, including HIV tests, we were indignant (my own doctor had laughed heartily at the Chinese state's medical demands of a healthy young woman, especially the electrocardiogram). It was a reminder that, however nervous we might feel about going to live in China, China -- opening up gradually after decades of Maoist introversion -- was equally nervous about us.

The protected enclave of the campus we inhabited was known by the Chinese students as the Panda Building, because it seemed to them that we were treated like some rare and endangered species. Our Chinese counterparts lived in concrete dormitories where they were crammed together, eight to a room, with no heating in winter and no air-conditioning in summer, and distant communal showers that were available only at certain hours of the day. We lived in carpeted twin rooms with heaters and air-conditioners, and every floor of our building had its own kitchens, washing machines and bathrooms. Our dining room offered à la carte Sichuanese food much better (and much more expensive) than that served in the Chinese students' canteen. There was a watchman at the gate of our compound, and an office from which the sinister staff of the foreign affairs office kept an eye on our activities.

In the mid-nineties, the expatriate community in Chengdu was tiny. We foreign students numbered about 120 in all. Besides us, there were just a few American consulate workers, foreign teachers and aid workers, and a mysterious businessman from Peru. The forty or so Japanese students at the university were cliquey and exclusive. The rest of us, Italian, French, Mongolian, Russian, Ethiopian, Polish, Jordanian, Laotian, Ghanaian, German, Danish, Canadian and American, lived sociably together.

Everyone in Chengdu shopped in markets like this on a daily basis. There were no real supermarkets, yet. From time to time I would run into one of my teachers from the university, struggling through the crowd, bicycle basket overflowing with green onions, beansprouts, spinach and ginger, a recently killed fish hanging from the handlebars in a plastic bag, still twitching.

But if we lived in luxurious isolation, we had only to step outside the dormitory to be overwhelmed by the hubbub of Sichuanese life. Just around the corner from the side gate of the university was a market overflowing with fresh and seasonal produce. Fish leapt and eels wriggled in tanks of water, ducks and chickens squawked in their pens. Vegetables and fruits were piled up in great bamboo trays: water spinach and bamboo shoots, garlic stems and bitter melons, seasonal treats like three-coloured amaranth, loquats, and 'spring shoots', the tender leaves of the Chinese toon tree. One stall sold a dozen different types of beancurd. Farmers sat on tiny stools behind woven bamboo baskets heavy with produce, ready to weigh them out by the jin or the liang with their old-fashioned, hand-held balances, and tot up the bill on an abacus.

Very quickly, the stallholders became familiar to me. The squint-eyed old woman in white overalls who sat before her bags and jars of spices: blood-red dried chillies, whole and ground; dusky-pink Sichuan pepper. The handsome flower-seller, smart in a dark business suit, slumped in his tiny bamboo chair, leaning back against the brick wall in a peaceful sleep, surrounded by a sea of brilliant roses and carnations. When a customer appeared and roused him with a gentle word, his eyes would blink open, and he would smile good-naturedly, light a cigarette and take money for one of his rainbow bouquets.

Although the market was busy in the mornings and the late afternoons, there was a period after lunch when the xiu xi, or siesta, took over, especially when the weather was warm. Then, not only the flower-seller, but everyone else too, seemed to be asleep. Rural women snoozed over their squashes and aubergines, cradling their heads in circled arms. Tomato and bean sellers drooped over crouched-up knees. The fishmonger lay back against the wall, snoring gently. And beyond the market, the entire city appeared also to be suffused with drowsiness. Rickshaw drivers lounged in their empty passenger seats, feet up on the saddles of their tricycles. Office workers lay down on fake leather sofas, sprawled like cats.

Now that the world is besotted with China, it is hard to remember how marginal it seemed in the early nineties. No one, then, would have considered going to Shanghai for a glamorous holiday or shopping. Few British universities offered Chinese courses; the idea of Mandarin being taught in schools would have seemed laughable. In London, my friends saw my Chinese studies as eccentric, if not hilarious. Even to me, Mandarin seemed a fairly irrelevant language.

Despite the immediate charms of Chengdu, I spent my first weeks there in a state of misery and confusion. I didn't really have a clue what I was doing in China. My life until then had been like a conveyor belt that had carried me, almost unthinking, from my academic hothouse of a high school to Cambridge University, and then to the BBC. For a long time I had nurtured the idea of becoming a professional cook, but I left university with debts, and the short-term BBC contract I took to pay them off led to the offer of a permanent post, which I lacked the courage to refuse. By my early twenties, I was stuck in a dry, academic job that didn't suit me at all, and exhausted by a daily commute from London to Reading. So when my colleague brought up the idea of a British Council China scholarship, I seized the chance to escape.

From the moment I arrived in China, I was almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. Email and the Internet were, for the majority of people, no more than unlikely rumours; an exchange of letters with a friend in England could take several weeks. There were only three places in Chengdu where cross-continental telephone calls were possible, and, if you found one, the cost of a call was astronomical (you could host a dinner party in a restaurant for the price of three minutes' conversation with Europe). Outside the glitzy sophistication of the city's two international hotels, Western food hardly existed, and the only foreign cultural activity available was watching pirated videos in a row of illegal cinema shacks near the university. Even news was hard to access, and censored when it came from official sources. My classmates and I were stranded in China, like it or not, and outside the cocoon of the Foreign Students' Building we had little choice but to throw ourselves into Sichuanese life.

My own supposed studies offered me little sense of direction. My Chinese was too poor for any serious academic research, and, besides, I had chosen a research subject fraught with political sensitivities. The books and journals in the university library were filled with propaganda -- fairy stories about ethnic harmony and the gratitude of the Tibetans for the benevolent overlordship of the Chinese state. University lecturers became twitchy when the conversation veered towards uncomfortable subjects, and tried to steer it back to the safety of platitudes. I didn't know how to begin my work. China was not the totalitarian state of my London friends' imagination, but neither was it open, and for a newcomer it was impossible to gauge the boundaries. Even the locals found it confusing. The juddering old framework of the state economy was falling apart, along with the political controls of the Maoist era. No one really knew the rules. The whole country, waking up after the nightmare of Maoism, was making it up as it went along.

Socially and culturally, China was challenging, too. As outsiders, my fellow students and I were still unusual enough to be treated as freaks or celebrities. We were interviewed by journalists, and invited to give speeches about nothing in particular at prestigious events. Crowds gathered to scrutinise our most trivial actions, even buying a bus ticket. A simple bicycle ride across town would provoke a Mexican wave of attention, as passers-by dropped what they were doing to watch us, and shout out 'Hello!' or 'Lao wai!' (foreigner). People were almost unfailingly nice to us, but it was difficult living under a microscope, and it took months to begin to understand what was really going on. You couldn't just parachute into China and start achieving -- after half a year, perhaps, you might be able to start fumbling your way through the political and social system.

And then there was the slow, insinuating lethargy of the place itself. Chengdu was a city where it was virtually impossible to have any plans, let alone fulfil them. Since the Tang Dynasty it had been renowned for its easy life, the fruit of a gentle climate and soil of legendary fecundity. The inhabitants of Chengdu didn't have to work particularly hard to eat well and enjoy themselves. Their city had a southern, almost Mediterranean feel about it. People there moved more slowly than they did in Beijing or Shanghai. They sat in teahouses all afternoon and evening, playing Mah Jong or cards, exchanging banter in the honeyed cadences of Sichuan dialect, with its long, drawn-out vowels and burred 'r's. 'Bai long men zhen' they called it, this leisurely Sichuanese habit of conversation. And the most expressive word in Sichuanese must be 'hao suanr' (good fun), said lazily, with a broad grin, the creak of a bamboo chair in the background. 'Those coastal people,' one taxi driver told me, speaking of the Cantonese and Fujianese, 'they are ambitious and hardworking; that's why they've been the first to get rich. We Sichuanese just want to earn enough to fill our bellies with good food.'

I wasn't the only foreign student finding it hard to concentrate. My classmates and I heard from friends in Beijing and Shanghai about tough attendance regulations at other universities; miss a few lessons in those places and you might lose your scholarship. But in Sichuan, nobody cared. A few of us, mostly those with prior experience of China, settled down to some serious study. Otherwise, one by one, gradually and inexorably, we all dropped out of our official classes. My roommate Filomena spent most of her time playing Mah Jong. A young Danish student, Sören, hung around in the park, learning martial arts from a frail, elderly master. Volker, a German who was taking a break from his successful career as a film production manager in Los Angeles, idled away his days and weeks in conversation. The rest played rugby, fell in love, got drunk, and went travelling, here and there.

As for me, I spent the first month trying to be a conscientious student, and beating myself up about my lack of academic progress. But I found myself caring less and less about my scholarship, and my career. And so, after a few dark weeks of depression, I decided, like most of my classmates, to abandon my preconceptions, simply to be in Sichuan, and to let the place take me as it would. Loosed of my disabling mental moorings and opening my eyes, finally, to the enchanting city around me, I allowed Sichuan to work its slow, sweet magic on me. And that was the beginning of the most wonderful period of my life.

Convention carves China into four great regional cuisines. In the north there is the grand, stately culinary school of Beijing and Shandong Province (lu cai). This is the food of emperors and courtiers, famed for its roast meats, unbelievably rich soups, and expensive delicacies like shark's fin and sea cucumber. In the east, you have the refined and subtle cooking of the literati, who mused about the pleasures of eating in cultural centres like Yangzhou and Hangzhou (it is known as huai yang cai). Think, here, of sweet, soy-dark braises; 'drunken' shrimps steeped in old Shaoxing wine; fresh aquatic vegetables like water chestnuts and lotus; and steamed freshwater crabs dipped in fragrant Zhenjiang vinegar.

Mention Chengdu to any Chinese person and the first thing they will say in response is almost certainly that the food is very spicy: 'Are you afraid of chilli heat?' (Ni pa bu pa la?) is the customary warning for travellers on their way to Sichuan. But give them a moment more and they are likely to smile with remembered pleasure, and murmur something about the magnificence of the local cuisine. 'I never raise my chopsticks without remembering my dear Sichuan,' sighed the Song Dynasty poet Lu You. 'Go to China for food, but for flavour, you must go to Sichuan,' is the mantra of modern gourmets.

In the south, there is the notoriously fresh food of the Cantonese (yue cai), so fresh it is almost alive. In this region, chefs apply seasonings with a gentle touch -- just a little salt, sugar, wine and ginger to enhance the natural flavours of their raw ingredients. Cooking is precise, intervention minimal: a steamed fish, treated lightly with ginger, green onion and soy; translucent shrimp dumplings; a stir-fry of slivered ingredients in which everything is perfectly crunchy or tender, according to its own particular nature. And they adore to eat wild things here, too: snakes and frogs, civet cats and yellow-breasted buntings.

Sichuanese food (chuan cai) is the spice girl among Chinese cuisines, bold and lipsticked, with a witty tongue and a thousand lively moods. 'Each dish has its own style,' they say, 'and a hundred dishes have a hundred different flavours.' Sichuanese cooking doesn't require extravagant raw ingredients like Cantonese or Shandong. Yes, you can fashion a Sichuanese banquet out of such things if you must; but you can, equally, work wonders with the most humble ingredients, dazzle the tastebuds with a simple repast of pork and aubergines. This is the greatness of Sichuanese cuisine, to make the ordinary extraordinary.

They were eating spicy food in the Sichuan region at least as far back as sixteen hundred years ago, when the historian Chang Qu remarked on local people's liking for bold and interesting flavours. Go to Sichuan and you realise that this isn't so much a matter of choice as of environmental determinism. The Sichuan basin has a humid climate: in winter, a creeping dampness penetrates every layer of clothing; summers are insufferably hot and sultry, with the sun hidden behind a haze of mist. In terms of Chinese medicine, the body is an energetic system, in which damp and dry, cold and hot, yin and yang, must be balanced; if they are not, illness is sure to follow. And although the moist Sichuan air keeps the skin of the women soft and youthful, it can destabilise the body as a whole. Therefore the people of this region have, for as long as anyone can remember, felt obliged to doctor their diets with dry, warming foods to counter the unhealthy humours of the climate. Until the first chillies arrived from the Americas, however, the only warming ingredients they had at their disposal were a few ancient imports from Central Asia, and native spices like Sichuan pepper.

The first chillies were seen in China in the sixteenth century, when Portuguese traders, newly returned from South America, sailed their galleons into the eastern ports. The Chinese of the coastal regions admired the chilli plant first as an ornament, with its delicate white flowers and vibrant scarlet fruits. It was only later that they began to use the piquant fruits as a seasoning. Merchants took the chilli up the waterways of the Yangtze Delta to the central province of Hunan, and from there to Sichuan, a little further westwards along the river. It was in these two warm, humid provinces that the chilli found its spiritual home. They were all but waiting for it; there was a place ready in their medical and culinary cosmologies. Its blazing colour lit up the grey mistiness of their skies, and its fiery heat drove out the dampness in people's bodies, bringing a delicious equilibrium to their lives.

Sichuan pepper is the original Chinese pepper, used long before the more familiar black or white pepper stole in over the tortuous land routes of the old Silk Road. It is not hot to taste, like the chilli, but makes your lips cool and tingly. In Chinese they call it ma, this sensation; the same word is used for pins-and-needles and anaesthesia. The strange, fizzing effect of Sichuan pepper, paired with the heat of chillies, is one of the hallmarks of modern Sichuanese cookery.

The canteen in the Foreign Students' Building at Sichuan University was a dull place, serving food that was fresh but soulless. With our meagre allowances and the teeming market just outside, we scholarship students might therefore have taken advantage of the cooking facilities in the Foreign Students' Building and made our own food. Some did, like Areej, the young Jordanian woman who kept house for her husband Taizer and baby Motaz in a single room in the dormitory, but most of us were too lazy. Besides, we quickly discovered that the food available outside the campus was so thrilling and plentiful that it would have been senseless to waste our time fighting for space in the communal kitchens. So every day, at lunchtime, we trooped out to a favourite noodle shop and guzzled bowlfuls of noodles with a variety of toppings. In the evenings, we pitched up at one of half a dozen little restaurants in wooden cottages near the university. Our Chinese student friends found our constant dining-out extravagant, but to foreigners it seemed ridiculously cheap. A noodle lunch set us back a few kuai (30p), while one person's share of an abundant group dinner with plenty of beer rarely amounted to more than 12 kuai (about £1).

After a few weeks in Chengdu we knew the names of all the essential dishes. La zi ji, dry, crisp, sizzling pieces of chicken buried in an improbable mound of seared chillies; yu xiang qie bing, a pile of succulent aubergine fritters stuffed with minced pork and bathed in a luxuriant sweet-sour-spicy sauce; hui guo rou, fat pork stir-fried with Chinese leeks in an indescribably delicious chilli bean sauce… actually there were chillies everywhere: as a dip for aromatic duck hearts and livers, in the chilli oil drizzled over our chicken slivers; in the sauces for our pork and our aubergines. Whole, chopped, red, green, fresh, dried, ground, pickled, steeped in oil, the variety was infinite. Yet the spicy cooking of Chengdu never lived up to the fiendish reputation that so terrified visitors from other parts of China. For a taste of that, you had to travel a few hours by bus to Sichuan's second city, the great Yangtze metropolis of Chongqing.

I went there once, soon after my arrival in Chengdu, to pay a visit to my musician friend Zhou Yu's parents. It had a filthy magnificence, that city, in the early nineties. Its buildings, tainted by the pollution from factory chimneys, were scattered on steep slopes that fell away to the broad sweep of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers where they met in a fork far below. It was a fierce, hard-working river port, where people spent their days trudging up and down hills and battling with a humidity so stifling that, in summer, it was known as one of China's 'furnace' cities. Even in Sichuan, Chongqing was infamous for the ma la (numbing-and-hot) punchiness of its food.

No one would decide to go and live in Chongqing after such a baptism of fire. But Chengdu is a gentle city. Life there is not a battle against the elements and the gradient of hills, it is a sweet, idle dream. Chillies are used not in violence, but to awaken and stimulate the palate, to make it alive to the possibilities of other tastes. They are melded with an undercurrent of sweetness, a robust beany savouriness, or a splash of mellow vinegar-sour, to seduce and delight. In Chengdu, Sichuanese cuisine is not the assault course of international stereotype, it is a teasing, meandering and entirely pleasurable journey.

Zhou Yu's parents invited me out, on a sweltering evening, for a hotpot supper by the river. We took our seats around a wok in which an inconceivably large mass of dried red chillies, Sichuan peppercorns and other spices were stuck in a thick, pasty layer of fat. A waiter bent down and ignited a gas flame underneath the table. As the wok warmed up, the fat began to melt, and soon the chillies were bobbing around in it. The waiter brought plates of raw ingredients: beef offal and mushrooms, beancurd and greens. We used our chopsticks to cook them in the fiery broth. Every morsel emerged from the pot in a slick of fiery oil, studded with spices; even a single beansprout came out embroiled with a mouthful of chilli. By the end of the meal, I was almost delirious with heat. My mouth burned and tingled, my body ran with sweat. I felt ragged and molten; pain and pleasure were indistinguishable.

A few cottages down, on the opposite side of the street, was 'The Italian', which was actually nothing of the kind. Named after a long-forgotten group of Italian students who used to frequent it, the restaurant served the usual Sichuanese food and became our favourite venue for special dinners and birthday parties. On such occasions we would take over one of its two rooms and feast at a table laden with dishes. We would drink copious quantities of spirits that seared our throats and gave us rotten hangovers and listen to Jay -- a Canadian English teacher -- make one of his speeches, which were always deliberately pompous, peppered with random phrases of Chinese, and side-splittingly funny, especially after a few rounds of the local firewater.

I quickly became a regular at the Bamboo Bar, one of the restaurants near the university that was known for its hearty flavours and friendly atmosphere. It was a simple place, housed in a ramshackle wooden cottage, but the food was sensational and I never tired of it. By six o'clock every evening, it was already noisy and jam-packed with people. Customers sat on low bamboo stools around square wooden tables, tucking into fragrant stir-fries and steaming soups. The waitresses, young peasant girls from the countryside who slept like sardines in the low-ceilinged attic upstairs, bustled around with bottles of beer. Po po ('Granny'), the owner's mother, presided over the abacus at a counter by the door.

In those days the restaurants we visited didn't even have fridges, and the beer was kept cool by being stored in a bucket of water. Meat and vegetables were bought daily from the markets; if you wanted an ingredient the restaurant didn't have, one of the girls might be despatched to buy it outside. Fish and eels lived in tanks in the kitchens. And everything, apart from the slow-braised soups and stews, was freshly cooked. Hygiene inspectors would no doubt have blanched at the cooked offal sitting around in unchilled cabinets, the reusable wooden chopsticks, and the poor facilities for washing up, but we almost never fell ill.

On warm evenings we would drift down to the riverbank outside the university, where a rash of al fresco restaurants had sprung up under the wutong trees. We would sit for hours under their branches, sipping beer in the uneven light of hanging lightbulbs and candles stuck into the necks of beer bottles, nibbling pig's ear, lotus-root slices, and fresh green soybeans squeezed out of their pods. All around us, people lounged around in bamboo chairs, laughing and chatting in Sichuan dialect, shouting in excitement as they played hua quan, a noisy finger-guessing game that was all the rage. Cicadas hummed in the trees overhead.

Sitting in the Bamboo Bar, watching grand platters of fish and mysterious claypot soups being brought to neighbouring tables, wafting their aromas under my nose, I became frustrated. Two years of Chinese evening classes in London and two months of study in Taipei had failed to give me the most rudimentary tools for deciphering restaurant menus. The Sichuan university textbooks I'd encountered in my few weeks of class were deathly dull and totally impractical. Instead of introducing us to useful words like 'stir-fry' and 'braise', 'bamboo shoot' and 'quail', they had required us to learn by rote long lists of largely irrelevant Chinese characters: the names, for example, of the heroes and villains in the ancient epic The Three Kingdoms; the words for an ancient kind of chariot, weapon or musical instrument.

Learning Chinese characters is a painful process anyway; it nearly breaks you. They say that, to read a newspaper, you need to know two or three thousand, and that's only a fraction of the number of characters in existence. So you cram them into your head, writing them out, again and again, in rows of squares marked out on special paper, or on little cards that you paste to the wall or read over breakfast. Yet, however hard you try to keep them in your head, most of them fall out again, like flour through a sieve. It's a Sisyphean labour, thankless and frustrating, which is why so many foreigners who learn Chinese end up speaking it quite well, but largely unable to read or write. I resented wasting hours memorising the vocabulary of the classic romances, and so I stopped going to my language classes as well as my lessons on 'minorities history'. Instead I took a few private Chinese lessons, and spent the rest of my time hanging around markets and restaurants, or sitting in teahouses, poring over dictionaries and photocopies of local restaurant menus.

Ever since I was a child, I have loved to cook. After every family holiday in Europe, I tried to recreate foreign recipes that I had found particularly exciting. At university I spent one long summer vacation immersed in Turkish cookery. I had been invited to spend two months with a family friend, a Turkish porcelain mogul who lived in central Anatolia. As a young, unmarried woman staying in a Muslim family, I had little freedom to explore his old-fashioned hometown or the surrounding region, and spent most of my time at home with his extended family. Naturally, I gravitated towards the kitchen, and my diary filled up with recipes for stuffed vegetables, köfte and purslane salad. From my mother I had picked up the habit of guessing the ingredients and cooking methods of dishes in restaurants, picking up traces of herbs and spices, forensically analysing the food on my plate. By the age of eleven I already wanted to be a chef. But the conveyor belt of my education took me further and further away from food.

Students who get good grades at school are not encouraged to run away and work in restaurants. I remember one middle-school teacher laughing at me, incredulous, when I told him of my ambition. So I carried on passing exams, working hard and doing what was expected of me. It was in China, thousands of miles away from home and almost completely cut off from my past, that I was able to do what I really wanted. Finally, I was able to admit to myself that I was no socio-economic analyst, not even really a journalist, but a cook. It was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, mixing a dough in my hands or seasoning a soup, that I felt most completely myself. Growing up in Oxford, studying in Cambridge, working in London, I had been propped up by a string of academic and professional credentials that had seemed to define me in the eyes of other people. But in China none of that mattered. I was just one of a bunch of homesick and culturally disorientated foreigners, trying to find our feet in a country about which, despite all our studies, we actually knew very little. It took me some time to accept this, but in the end it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

For someone with a natural curiosity about food, Chengdu in the mid-nineties was a kind of paradise. It was all there, under your nose. In the backstreets, people cooked dinner for their families on charcoal braziers outside their cottages. The aromas of chilli-bean paste, Sichuan pepper and jasmine tea hung in the air on warm autumn nights. The most humble shack of a restaurant would often be serving Chinese food better than any you could find in London. Almost everyone in Sichuan seemed to love talking about cooking and eating. Surly taxi drivers waxed lyrical as they recounted to me, in great detail, their favourite recipes. Middle-aged couples slurping their lunchtime noodles would reminisce about the great beancurd chefs of the past. And I remember once listening to a radio broadcast in which a young female presenter recited the pleasures available at various city restaurants in tones that dripped with sensuality and greed. She murmured her way through an endless litany of dishes, lovingly describing their flavour and textures ('Oh, the ox tripe, so crisp and snappy!'), her words interspersed with breathy sounds of appreciation and excitement. She could barely contain herself. And she was typical of the people I met. As a chef friend once said to me, Chengdu people have 'hao chi zui' -- 'mouths that love eating'.

Within weeks of arriving in Chengdu, I was writing down my impressions of the food. Even on the first few pages of my first Sichuan notebook, dated September 1994, there are lists of fruits and vegetables on sale in the markets, and accounts of conversations about food. And once I had divested myself of my academic responsibilities, my casual food investigations took over my life. It was just irresistible. Every day brought new gastronomic discoveries: perhaps a street vendor specialising in a type of snack I'd never seen before, or a peasant scurrying along with baskets slung from a bamboo shoulderpole, bearing some unusual fruit or herbal tea. I leapt at every chance to spend time with Sichuanese friends and acquaintances in their kitchens. My friendship with Zhou Yu and Tao Ping, the couple whose hospitality had lured me to Chengdu in the first place, deepened. Now I went regularly to their small flat near the music conservatory for supper. Tao Ping's grandmother, a ninety-year-old woman who was still walking up and down twelve flights of stairs every day with bags full of ingredients from the nearest market, invited us over for a feast of dry-fried beans and braised duck with wild yam jelly. My private Chinese teacher, Yu Weiqing, welcomed me into her home from time to time for a slap-up dinner: she taught me just as much about cookery as about the Chinese language.

The Sichuanese are famously warm and relaxed, as different from their buttoned-up northern compatriots as the Neapolitans are from the British. I lost count of the number of chance encounters that led to invitations to dinner from strangers. I spent a memorable afternoon chatting to a roast-duck vendor in a backstreet near the Minshan Hotel, as he primed his birds with malt-sugar syrup and vinegar, and then roasted them in a domed oven made from bricks and clay. We talked as the ducks roasted, and soon he was inviting me to dine in a restaurant where he had an interest. For years afterwards (until his duck shop was demolished by city developers), whenever I cycled past, he would rush out for a chat, and press into my hands a jar of some spicy pickle or fermented beancurd that he had been keeping for me.

One public holiday, Zhou Yu and Tao Ping invited me to go with them on a trip out of town, to share a home-made hotpot with some friends. When we arrived, we went to the local market to buy ingredients, and then returned to the friends' apartment to set up a potful of spicy broth over a gas burner on the kitchen floor. Sitting around it on little stools, we cooked our own lunch, dipping into the pot strands of enoki mushrooms, ribbons of beancurd, sweet-potato noodles and crunchy pieces of tripe. There was a tangible shift in mood as the meal progressed. In the beginning we were lively and animated, but gradually a deep stupor overcame us all, and we drifted off and fell asleep on armchairs, sofas, anywhere. It was only later, after a long, blissful siesta had restored me to my senses, that I noticed the enormous poppyheads bobbing around in the broth.

Actually, though, you didn't need poppyheads to unwind and lose your inhibitions in Sichuan. There was something in the air, in the dialect, in the people, and above all in the food: a warmth and a languor that melted away any English stiffness, like butter in the sun. My heart was clenched like a fist when I moved to Chengdu. I could barely communicate, except through food. But as the weeks drifted past, I felt myself softening. For the first time in my life I was freed of all duties and expectations; life was a blank slate.