Go to China. Eat Chinese food. Only there, of course, they just call it food.

The Tiananman Gate in Beijing two days before the upper ranks of the Chinese Communist Party stood there to review to troops, the tanks and the smiling bananas.

Inside the Forbidden City, the entrance to which was amazingly un-geared up to Western Tourists. All the signs were in Chinese and I only saw about three Westerners in my whole afternoon there.

A bronze heron in the Forbidden City, symbolising... oh sorry Mr Bond, I wasn't paying attention was I... (the actor Roger Moore being my Acoustiguide, you see).

The view from one of our rooms in the International Hotel just as the curfew fell. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes drove me and Rob Gifford in his Jeep in a mad dash down the main street after it had been closed to traffic, waving his press card. Ours was the only vehicle on this normally incredibly busy road. Police lined the road on both sides and they stood there all night. We made it just in time, electing to spend the night in the International Hotel as our movements would be severely restricted on the day of the big parade. A huge rain storm washed the air and the streets on Thursday, leading to rumours that the clouds had been seeded a day early to prevent it raining on their parade.

Rupert ponders the chaos ahead in one of our two ISDN'd-up rooms in the International, while Duncan searches for les mots justes to describe Fifties Communist Kitsch in his latest despatch. We needed 2 ISDN lines as we were providing live commentary and two-ways with a plethora of outlets - World Today, World TV, 5 Live Breakfast, Good Morning Scotland (Good Morning Malcolm!) and so on - so at times we had two lives going on at the same time from Duncan and Rob Gifford, plus James Miles back at the bureau watching the wires and also providing analysis. China Telecom installed the lines and provided an NT-1 (Network Termination) box for each line so I could plug a Glensound into each line with no problems. Getting a line up was initially hit and miss but they were rock steady and we had no problems on the big day.

The floats begin to assemble.

And there's another one. And another. Are those really smiling bananas or did someone slip something in my coffee? Some floats had giant video screens let into the side, but given how disappointingly commercialised Beijing is, I was pleased to see that there was no commercial sponsorship - there was no Ronald McDonald and the floats had slogans in Chinese that were straight out of the 1953 Communist Joke Book - for example the float representing Taiwan said 'the Taiwan question cannot be postponed indefinately'. That must have cheered up the earthquake victims no end. Maybe it was that which prompted the World TV presenter to ask Carrie Gracie 'so tell me, are the people of Taiwan keener now on re-unification with China?'

I got to bed at 2.30 am Friday morning and had to be up at 5.30am for The World Today for East Asia - and the tanks of the PLA woke me up at 3.30am heading for Tiananman Square. Here they are going back up the road from the Square after the parade was over.

Nerd time. The self-op in the bureau - it has CoolPro, a Minidisc deck, several Studers/Revoxes that are never used, cassette deck, a TBU... and a photographic enlarger! It's the usual bureau MBI desk with cue on a fader marked 'London'. The bureau has 7 networked PCs with CoolPro - they have a shared local drive for audio and are also linked to London (logging in to the BBCLONDONBU domain took between 20 minutes and two hours, by the way). The PC in the self-op is wired up for playback, but there is not at present a desk-out feed going into its record input.

This amazingly Heath Robinson gizmo requests the leased line for use in the self-op - it's not ISDN but a 64k leased line that also networks the computers in the bureau to London. The line goes via Hong Kong and BH Control Room and appears in Stage 6 (NOC/Traffic) as BH5TNC, so you need to phone them and ask them to pick the line up. ISDN lines are not allowed in the Diplomatic Compound, where the BBC Bureau is, so we are lucky to be able to get quality audio out of Beijing. Well, China Telecom say the compound is on 'the wrong exchange' but that's a little convenient...

Around 2am on Saturday morning. Duncan Hewitt was meant to do a package for The World Tonight, but by midnight he had lost his voice and Rob Gifford was having to revoice his despatches. Rupert offered them a 2-way with John Simpson, but they said they'd rather have a package by Rupert - so it was all hands to the pump. Rob Gifford knocked out a script, we got some great actuality off Chinese TV and from Rob's vovpops earlier in the day, Rupert did a quick re-write and I did a speedy CoolPro mix - the result wasn't half bad considering. A celebratory photograph to record this historic moment in broadcasting history. The BBC Beijing Bureau has stood up - and now it has sat down, put its feet up and had a beer.

Me in the lobby of the International Hotel - the hotel is huge, lavish and utterly soulless, perhaps because it's state-run. Much better to stay where I did at the friendly Jianguo Hotel, a 15 minute walk from the bureau.

I had a wonderful time - the highlight was probably getting Duncan's Insight on air, getting a call from Tim Haynes saying he needed it in 20 minutes and I'd only just got all the inserts and I was a quarter of the way through mixing it on CoolPro... and of course it takes somewhere in the region of 14 minutes to play a 15 minute programme down the line...

The staff of the Beijing Bureau were incredibly helpful and friendly, especially Christine Yu, the office co-ordinator who put in long hours and worked miracles with the insane Chinese bureaucracy.