Our chopsticks skills improve every day, although oily noodles continue to squirt from my grip like live trout. Our most unusual dish is donkey meat, which has a dark, nutty flavour, surprisingly good. But stalls in a tourist hútòng, or alley, off Wangfujing Street proffer much wilder fare: scorpion kebabs - the scorpions still wriggling on the stick before they are fried - grubs, locusts, starfish, sea horses. Rhianna pulls a face at this exotica. She likes pizza, remember. So one night we treat her to Annie’s, an Italian restaurant popular with English-speaking expatriates. After our travails with chopsticks, it is fun to watch Rhianna puzzle over how to spear a slice of tomato with a fork.

One afternoon, I wander an upscale mall at the foot of Wangfujing Street. Rhianna’s grandmother in the country may still live on $60 a month, but here in the capital, enough people have hit the jackpot to support the most exorbitant display of luxe I have ever seen: an $800 pair of jeans; a diamond-encrusted Vertu cellphone for $100,000; watches of indescribable elegance, not just familiar über-brands like Rolex and Omega but masterpieces of Swiss engineering with double-barrelled names like Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet and Girard-Perregaux. In my limited experience, only the airport mall in Dubai, awash with diamonds and Lamborghinis, compares to it. Yet you could buy a Lamborghini for the cost of some of the timepieces in these Beijing boutiques.

In sticker shock, I exit onto Wangfujing Street. China really has changed since those two traumatic events that Westerners focus on so much, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square. Still, I wouldn’t want to be an environmental crusader or a champion of Tibetan culture in today’s China. But if I were a billionaire, I could now live here in a style befitting my means. That, too, is a revolution, of sorts.

RHIANNA HAS TO GO back to her day job, so Alexandra and I visit the Great Wall by ourselves. Visible even from the highway, it snakes along precipitous ridgelines atop the lovely rumpled mountains outside Beijing. Would-be invaders faced not just the Wall itself. Some of those ridges challenge even serious climbers. Over the centuries, thousands of workers died in its construction, and their bones lie interred within the brick.

The Great Wall near Beijing has three faces: Badaling, the Simatai-Jinshanling section and what some call the “wild wall.” On a summer weekend, 20,000 people a day visit the reconstructed strip at Badaling. Even mid-week, walking the Wall is like filing through the turnstiles after a Stanley Cup final. People shuffling in small steps, with the pace of the crowd. Graffiti on every brick. A gauntlet of souvenir kitsch. At the base of the Wall, for a few yuan (a couple of dollars), you can feed a live chicken to a lion or dress up in faux imperial robes and climb aboard a Bactrian camel. By contrast, the “wild wall” is totally undeveloped and sometimes hazardous and can be reached only by bushwhacking or trudging through farmers’ fields.

The 10-kilometre-long Simatai-Jinshanling section falls between these two extremes. A mere 200 people a day hike this fabulous stretch. From the village of Simatai, just over 100 kilometres from Beijing, we take a cable car partway up the mountain. A switchback trail leads the final 150 vertical metres up to the Wall.

The Great Wall of China is as much myth as mural. A National Geographic article from 1923, before magazines checked their facts, boldly proclaimed that it would be the only human object visible from the moon. This became one of those “too good to be false” tidbits that entrenched itself in the popular imagination. In fact, the Great Wall can barely be seen from a low-Earth orbit. If it were visible from the moon, then Trans-Canada Highway, which is wider, would be also.