In the UK a high-speed train is merely one that’s moving – it’s hard to conceive of a world in which fast trains are not only as fast as they say they are, but also smooth and comfortable into the bargain.

I’m currently writing at 217mph, and while the number is remarkable, the journey itself is impressively dull. If anything I’m probably a bit chilly with the aircon working aggressively to undercut the 30ºC heat of a baking Chinese spring.

You have to go through an ID check (a lady with a little belt-mounted speaker to amplify her voice when shouting at people let us through a side gate, you need a national Chinese ID card to get through the main gates) and then you ease down to a hushed platform where the high-speed train awaits.

There’s no messing around, these trains leave as punctually as you like. The timetable allows for two-minute stops along the route, but we actually get going out of Beijing main station an entire minute early. In London I wouldn’t even know what the platform number’s going to be yet.

The station itself is a world apart from anything we might be used to in Europe, a cross between a sports stadium and international airport. Roads swoop around the outside of the sleek building and you go through a thorough security scan before you’re allowed onto the concourse within. It’s a jostling, purposeful atmosphere, none of the arresting confusion of a British railway station.

The countryside is the washed out green of a hot day, the horizon distantly shimmering, the occasional hills flitting past. We pass through immense metropolises, with scores of identical tower blocks clustered around each other. The first stop is in a city called Jinan, that I’ve never knowingly heard of, but is home to 9.2 million people and is a steel centre for China, with the related heavy industry crammed in about the furnaces.

It’s barely even a glimpse at the scale and busy-ness of China as a country, but it’s an impressive enough insight merely to zoom past at incredibly efficient speed.