You are lounging in a warm plunge pool in the garden of a private villa while listening to “The Goldberg Variations.” Your robe and slippers are on the floor where you dropped them, right near the giant, pillow-mounded platform bed. You are thinking about having a brie omelet for breakfast, then a spa foot massage or a ginseng facial. You know you won’t have to tell the bartender how to mix a dry martini when you order one before dinner.Are you at Vermont’s luxurious Twin Farms resort and spa or the Plaza Athénée in Paris? Not even close.

I’m in Sudan, aren’t I?

You are at the Banyan Tree in the mountains of southwestern China, at one of the sophisticated new luxury hotels springing up all over the country.

Oh. I guess I should have known from the Bach and brie. Well, I guess China’s not so bad. At least I can count on good service, thousands of years in the making.

In Beijing alone, several new high-end hotels - including a Four Seasons and Mandarin Oriental - are due to open by the start of the Olympics in August.

You used to be able to count the number of China’s five-star hotels on five fingers, so the emergence of world-class accommodations here is welcome news for travelers.

Travel writing is a fairly lame exercise. I’m sure Susan Spano of the Los Angeles Times loves going to expensive hotels and resorts for free, but it’s kind like a deal with the devil because you still have to write about it and try to both sound like a know-it-all-snob, but not to sound too much like a snob because the majority of the people reading your paper do so at an eighth-grade level. So what do you do? You get lost in a world of your own where you start trying to turn stupid things like looking for hair-dryers and boring excursions to historical sites you researched on the plane ride over, into a cohesive narrative. 

You also readily employ lame devices like writing in the second person during your introduction.

China’s new luxe lodgings come with all the flourishes: state-of-the-art electronics, exceptional settings, international cuisine, dreamy spas and designer decor. Better still, the rates sometimes are appreciably lower than at such accommodations in the West.

But in other ways, Chinese hotels don’t always live up to their stars, partly because the government-sponsored rating system is based on facilities only, neglecting the quality of service.

Ah yes, those cheatin’ sneaky commies. How dare they fuck with my luxe stay, my gadgets and finger sandwiches — in the name of making a buck? 

“There are many five-star hotels in China that would be lucky to achieve a four-star rating in other countries,” said Damien Little, a director for the hotel consulting group Horwath HTL in Beijing.

The chief stumbling block has been the dearth of well-trained personnel. “The number of quality staff is limited, owing to the poor level of hospitality schooling in China,” said Guy Rubin, Beijing-based managing partner of Imperial Tours, which specializes in luxury trips to China. “Graduates are surprisingly ignorant of the service levels expected of them.”

What the hell is wrong with these people that they don’t have a decent hospitality school in all of South China? And furthermore, even the little bastards that do manage to find a hospitality school and graduate from it STILL don’t know what my inner-colonialist craves. They don’t know the Goldberg Variations from fucking Whoopi Goldberg.

Last spring, wanting to find what luxury means in China, I stayed at some of the highly touted new hotels: the Banyan Tree in Lijiang, the Hotel of Modern Art near Guilin in southern China and the Commune by the Great Wall, about 50 miles north of Beijing.

I’ll tell you what luxury means – luxe brie omelets in one of China’s poorest provinces, baby. Still, you’d think that’d make for good service wouldn’t you?

It wasn’t exactly a hardship posting, and there were wonderful surprises. But on other occasions, simply asking for a blow-dryer caused enough consternation to make me feel like a despotic empress.

And you were an empress. You were an empress from a faraway land. The kind of empress fit to be carried on the backs of six neutered, bald servants, taken to a state-of-the-art electronics store where you can buy a hair-dryer, take it back to your half eaten omelet and beat the poorly trained fuckface manager who never went to a proper hospitality school. Hit him! HIT HIM!

Banyan Tree Lijiang

There comes a point in almost every trip to China when travelers need a break from guides and tours, when they would give an army of terra-cotta warriors for a cup of freshly brewed coffee or when they don’t want to see another indecipherable restaurant menu or spend another night on a hard Chinese bed.

Sing it to me sister! Fuck those thousands of years old clay pigeons and give me some Starbucks. And while you’re at it get that gobbledygook scribble of a language out of my face and bring in a fresh cart of Panda Express. And when you’re done with that go pick up that little guy over there and beat my bed with his head until the mattress is nice and soft because I’ve had a hell of a day walking around this designer hotel.

That’s the time for the Banyan Tree Lijiang, which opened in 2006.

Banyan Tree is a small, Singapore-based hotel chain that specializes in flawless service, tasteful hedonism, eco-friendly operations and extraordinary scenery such as that around Lijiang, 120 miles from Yunnan’s capital Kunming in the far southwestern corner of China.

Visitors come here to see the mountains and enjoy the culture of the Naxi people, one of China’s most colorful ethnic minorities. Naxi arts and crafts are on display in the beautifully preserved old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of glacier-fed canals, cobblestone streets, bridges and shop houses.

It’s a little known fact that Yunan Province, in addition to having the highest number of AIDS cases in China, is also the epicenter of tasteful hedonism. Though there’s nothing tasteful about those little Nakhi, who only speak babble, also known as the Naxi language. You end up liking them because they’re small and cute. Like elves. Musical elves. They play this cute traditional music and run around singing and…well, being colorful.

Modern development is fast claiming the wide, mountain-rimmed valley, so it was wise of Banyan Tree to choose a site in the bucolic farm fields about five miles outside town.

Tis sad, tis sad. Soon enough the view from my window will be filled with Starbucks, Sharper Images and European discotheques. Even from five miles away. I hope those little people find some place to go on being cute and colorful. Hmm…maybe someone should open a hospitality school.

Besides strolling and shopping for Naxi crafts in the nearby village of Shuhe, hotel guests go horseback riding in the foothills or trek in nearby Tiger Leaping Gorge. But, honestly, it’s hard to leave the compound once you pass through the peak-roofed portal.

Like the Forbidden City in Beijing, the hotel is symmetrically arranged around a series of ever-widening courtyards that yield to a shop, lounge, bar and the Banyan Tree’s two restaurants, one serving elegant Chinese cuisine, the other contemporary Asian fusion.

You know, it really is like the Forbidden City. Because the Forbidden City was built by slaves for an emperor to keep outsiders out and royalty in. And when the day is done, and I’m scrambling around like a blind servant in search of a latte, and I’m tired of the off key caterwauling of the Naxis, believe me or you, I want to indulge in some tasteful hedonism — like getting my feet massaged by a properly trained whatchamacallit that can, you know, parle’ vous some anglais. I might even order me up a Big Eyed Tuna Pizza and a dry martini from that Asian fusion joint downstairs.

Beyond that, a network of canals feeds into a broad reflecting pool fringed by weeping willows. The branches were strung with red lanterns, a breathtaking sight when illuminated at night.

Most of the guests were tourists from the West, Hong Kong and Taiwan able to pay rates - starting around $500 a night - that are high by any standard. Besides the sophisticated, pitch-perfect staff, made up of workers from all over Asia, I saw few other people because each of the hotel’s 55 chambers is a supremely private, single-story villa surrounded by its own gray brick wall.

My simple but elegant quarters were decorated with contemporary Chinese fabrics, lamps and furniture. To the right, the bedroom opened onto a palatial bath and dressing area. To the left, was a small lounge with a settee.

But the room’s true glory was the stunning view from the sliding-glass window: Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, actually a series of peaks, stretching 20 miles from north to south and topping out at 18,360 feet. Cloud banks stream by its face so fast that watching the mountain is like looking out the window of a speeding train.

I passed a long afternoon that way. I needed nothing else, except that dry martini that arrived at sunset, perfectly shaken, not stirred.

I like the way Barbara is highlighting that the workers are from all over Asia. As opposed to what? A staff exclusively from just about the poorest place in Asia…Yunan province? So there are Japanese and Korean people working there too? Might be, because they certainly weren’t visiting amongst all the people from Hong Kong and Taiwan who were mingling with those people from “The West.”