Here are the available villas for rental in China.

Journey into the great beyond

From the Mail on Sunday

The waitress in the dining car is as fiercely cheerless as a blizzard and just as lovely. She brusquely slaps the menu on the table. Outside, the landscape between our last stop, Vyatka, and our next, Balyezino, is radiant in the summer sunshine; in here, there is a pronounced chill.
'Salad?' I enquire, already suspecting that this may be a rhetorical question. Salad is off, apparently. 'Nyet salad.' Other diners are chomping on tomato and cucumber starters, but I let it pass. There's a long way to go, and it would be a bad idea to offend the caterers this early in the piece.
'How about the fish?' 'Nyet fish.' She is similarly, loftily - indeed, rather magnificently - dismissive of enquiries after beef, chicken or soup. Eventually, she jabs a pencil to indicate that she might, if pushed, be prepared to serve me omelette with sausage. When it arrives, it's as atrocious as might be expected - the thought of what Russians would consider bad food is a truly horrifying one - but my journey now has a purpose.
The train for the first leg of my journey to Beijing left Moscow's Yaroslavski station last night, and has almost three days to go to Irkutsk, its terminus and my first stopover. I have about 70 hours to get a smile out of Ms Nyet-Salad. I thank her profusely and leave an immense tip. She doesn't flinch.
You can fly from Moscow - an ostensibly capitalist city that is still taking to the free market like a goat to roller-blading - to Beijing - a Communist citadel being triumphally reinvented as a neon-spangled consumerist Babylon, the Great Mall of China - in eight or nine hours.
However, the distance between the two deserves better than being ignored from on high. The 4,887 miles of the Trans-Mongolian route contains forests and deserts, factories and farms, cities and villages, Nike super-stores and statues of Lenin, two border crossings involving searches, and hours of mysterious waiting, and one change of wheels (China's rails are narrower than those of Russia and Mongolia: at Erlyan, just inside the People's Republic, the train is jacked up while new bogies are attached).
The passengers are equally diverse - Russian soldiers, Mongolian bootleggers, Chinese diplomats, Uzbek and Kazakh traders, Australian and British backpackers, and platoons of German tourists (who have block-booked the restaurant car).
As the big blue train leaves Moscow, there is only one other person in my four-berth second-class compartment. Valentin is from Omsk, and while his negligible English and my non-existent Russian make conversation impossible, we find common ground with a timetable printed in English and Russian.
As I swap instant coffee for some of his excellent home-made biscuits, we review the name changes the towns ahead of us have undergone: Vyatka, previously named for Stalin-henchman-turned-Stalin-victim Sergei Kirov; Yekaterin-burg, the end of the line for Russia's royal family, for years called Sverdlovsk after Yacob Sverdlov, the Communist official who organised the Romanovs' murder; Perm, once known as Molotov.
The train, unlike almost everything else in Russia, is clean, comfortable, efficient and, Ms Nyet-Salad aside, run by cheerful and friendly people. The smartly uniformed female attendants vacuum and polish the carriage twice daily and perform heroics in keeping the lavatories bearable (sadly, standards slip dramatically when, after Irkutsk, the carriages are crewed by men). ... more

Wall-to-wall tourism

From the Daily Mail

Say Tiananmen Square and you conjure up that memory of a lone student standing, vulnerable but defiant, in front of a tank sent to crush the demonstrations in 1989.
It ended in a massacre which left hundreds dead and China in the tourist doghouse.
Now, with the Olympics coming up in 2008, tourism is once again big business, and such brutal images have been airbrushed from history.
The once cold, bleak square has been re-paved to hide the damage caused by churning tank tracks - whatever you do, don't mention the massacre.
Tiananmen has been re-invented as a public park, and tourists are welcome.
Of course, the communist party still rules - and the massive portrait of Chairman Mao which has pride of place on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, leading from the square to the Forbidden City, confirms it.
As does the slogan next to the portrait, which translates as 'Ten thousand years for the People's Republic of China' and the ceremonial raising and lowering of the Red Flag at dawn and dusk each day by immaculate troops from the People's Liberation Army.
But on a crisp spring evening, the square is packed with budding capitalists cheekily peddling their wares to Western visitors.
As well as snacks and the usual maps and postcards, you can buy cheap forgeries of Rolex and other expensive makes.
They also sell copies of Mao's cap and his famous Little Red Book, the one which was waved by millions during the Cultural Revolution.
Today, few Chinese want this volume. ... more