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Beijing is my favorite city in China.

My hometown is a very boring city. There isn't a lot of industry - there are a lot of trees. It's not like Beijing where the sky is always dark. In my city the sky is blue and the sun shines.

I went to China for a brief working visit, and I thought that Shanghai was interesting, but Beijing totally grabbed me.

To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme.

In order for me to write a scene, it's very important for me to see and experience everything with my own eyes, so yes, I was able to visit some remarkable houses and destinations while I was in China.

I always was fascinated with China, because I was born in Europe, and for us, China had this fascination and mystery. The first time I came here was in 1989. They were on bicycles, and the speed of the growth has been incredible.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.

By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core.