I coughed and spluttered as the chain-smoking Chinese official lit up yet another cigarette. The fact that we were in a small room didn't help. By the end of my hour-long interview I counted seven butts in the ashtray through a hazy cloud.
I couldn't help thinking if this was Ireland, or indeed most other Western countries, the official wouldn't have been smoking in a public building; and if he was going to smoke, he would have first asked if I minded.
Take my advice. If you are planning to quit smoking, avoid China, one of the last happy hunting grounds for cigarette lovers in the world.
I was never a heavy smoker but haven't let a cigarette pass my lips in 17 months. Having arrived from Ireland, where smoking is now, thankfully, a dirty word, the thriving smoking culture here came as a shock.
The stench of nicotine is everywhere. In lifts, in taxis, in restaurants, in office buildings, in hotel rooms. As you walk along the streets, you'll see men on their hunkers inhaling cigarette smoke as if there was no tomorrow.
A regular sight in a restaurant is chopsticks in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Often you see Chinese men not just smoking between courses, but during courses.
Last week our car broke down and the man from the garage practically forced a cigarette down the throat of my now nonsmoking husband as he towed the car back into town. "Good for you, good for you," the mechanic declared as he shoved a cigarette into his face. He was quite offended at the refusal.
The statistics are frightening. China has 320 million smokers - more than six times as many as the US.
An estimated 750,000 people will die from smoking-related illnesses in China this year. If current trends continue, this figure is expected to jump to two million by 2020, according to the most recent study on smoking in China, published in 1999 by the American Medical Association.
One in three cigarettes smoked in the world today are smoked in China. There are five million teenage smokers. An alarming 63 per cent of Chinese men smoke. Only 16.8 per cent of smokers want to quit and fewer than half recognise that lung cancer is smoking related, according to the study.
There was one celebrated smoking case more than 10 years ago. A Hong Kong doctor who was doing research on nicotine addiction came across a four-year-old boy living in a rural part of China who smoked. The boy moved in with nonsmoking relatives to give him a chance to kick the habit.
One of the problems is the cheap price of cigarettes and the wide variety of brands available.
China's biggest cigarette production centre is Yunnan Province, home to several popular brands such as Yuxi, Hong tashan, Honghe, Shililng and Yunyan.
Most cities have their own favourite local brand. Up to a few years ago Derby cigarettes, which cost only 22p, were the choice for Beijingers who claimed the taste was as close to Marlboro as you could get for a fraction of the cost. A Chinese smoking friend tells me that nowadays preferences have shifted to Zhongnanhai, which have low tar and nicotine and which cost 40p.
However the die-hard smokers go for Weilong, the cheapest at only 16p a packet and which has more nicotine than other cigarette brands. Foreign brands are popular and can be bought cheaply on the black market.
Some Chinese leaders are famous for their smoking prowess. The late Deng Xiaoping, the man credited with opening up China to the rest of the world, reputedly smoked four packets a day. His trademark favourite was the exclusive Panda brand, which today sell at £10 a pack.
To be fair, there have been some moves in the right direction in the last couple of years. For example, smoking has been banned on the subway and in buses, and many department stores don't allow it either. Cigarettes cannot be sold to anyone under 18 years of age.
Most tobacco advertising is also banned but cigarette companies have found legal ways to get their brand names before the public through sponsorship of radio programmes, music and sports events.
Both domestic and foreign cigarette manufacturers - who have been trying to tap into the huge Chinese cigarette market - now face their first serious challenge. And not from the state.
A group of 10 Chinese law firms announced this week they are coming together to sue cigarette companies on behalf of teenage smokers on the grounds of a breach of consumer and advertising laws. They are hoping to repeat the success of similar legal action taken against tobacco giants in the US.
But the reality is that with several thousand different brands in the country, China's economy is very much tied to tobacco. The industry employs millions of people and 12 per cent of China's total tax revenue last year came from cigarette producers.
The powerful pull of the cigarette will be hard to extinguish.
miriamd@163bj.com