Elegance, to a tea: Sara Jane Ho charges thousands to teach manners to Beijing women

Sara Jane plans to show her students pictures and videos of Kate Middleton – someone who, like China itself, rose from a relatively humble background to take her place at the top table.

She says: ‘Kate is probably the most followed Royal in China. She is very elegant, very classy. Even though she is not from an aristocratic family, she carries herself very well and I think she is a role model for the younger generation around the world.

‘All my students will know who she is. It is very demanding to be a role model and to have everybody watch your every move, but she has carried it off with so much class and patience. She seems to exude kindness and etiquette awareness and care for others. The English adore her as well, don’t they?’

Culture clash: Sara Jane Ho teaches table manners at her etiquette school in a five-star hotel in Beijing where students pay £2,000-£10,000 to learn how to present themselves the British way

Clear instructions: A 'no spitting' sign at a textile factory in Zhejiang Province

Sipping elegantly from a bowl of vegetable soup in a trendy Beijing restaurant, Sara Jane, a 27-year-old graduate of Harvard Business School, says China misplaced its manners during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Her own family fled and then made its  fortune in Hong Kong.

In her plummy British accent, she says: ‘I am Chinese and very proud of my country. I don’t think the vast majority of Chinese people are purposely offensive. They just haven’t been enlightened to etiquette awareness.

‘The Cultural Revolution wiped a lot of that away. When you are pushing to the front of the food ration line just to get that last bit of rice to feed your family, you don’t have the luxury to think about etiquette. You are just trying to survive.’

She is hoping to invite British  aristocrats to lecture her students and even has plans to lead classes on a Grand Tour, taking in the opera houses and art galleries of Europe to complete their education.

Model behaviour: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is the inspiration for many young, high society Chinese women

Converting Beijing’s nouveau riche will be no small task. At an introductory lesson, female students drove up in a convoy of Maseratis, Ferraris and Bentleys, then emerged in a maelstrom of fur and diamonds. Their nails were so ornate they had difficulty handling the cutlery.

‘In Hong Kong and London, it is all about subtlety,’ explains Sara Jane. ‘In Beijing, I will go out for lunch with a girlfriend and she will have a big Marc Jacobs ring that you open up and it’s a lip balm. When I go out to socialite events in Beijing and I put on minimal make-up, they say, “Darling, you didn’t put make-up on today. Are you feeling OK?” ’

Multi-millionaire’s wife Zaozao Jiang, one of her new students, says the shocking manners of her fellow countrymen have almost driven her abroad. ‘I simply can’t abide people who pick their noses, spit and talk too loudly,’ complains the glamorous 30-year-old Beijing socialite.

Zaozao, whose husband heads one of China’s biggest auction houses and has a family income equivalent to £1 million a month, is an eye-catching regular in the society columns of China’s glossy magazines.

 She adds: ‘Some people behave like barbarians. They eat and drink loudly and take phone calls in the middle of dinner or at a movie. There are so many wealthy people in China but they have no manners. I often think about migrating to another country because of it.’

Zaozao will pay between £5,000 and £6,000 for her course and says she is already amazed at what she has learned from two introductory sessions, adding: ‘We were taught how to shake hands, and how you should always have eye contact when you’re talking to people. Before the course, I didn’t know how to wipe my mouth properly with a napkin or how to fold it before placing it in my lap – or even how to tear a piece of bread and put butter on it.’

She pauses, then adds with a shudder: ‘It’s only now that I realise how terribly rude I must have seemed.’

China’s lack of manners has become something of a national embarrassment, with academics openly debating in the state-run media how habits can be changed. Certainly, public behaviour can come as a shock to Westerners.

On one of my first visits in 2004, I learned not to put my head out of a bus window. When I did so, a man three rows ahead spat expertly and copiously out of the window and scored a direct hit on me. It is not uncommon to see people blowing their noses without a handkerchief.

My translator told me, however, that many Chinese believe phlegm is toxic and that spitting it out expels poison from the body. To them, she said, our habit of blowing our noses into a handkerchief and putting it in our pockets is just as repugnant.

Sara Jane hopes that the perfect manners she is teaching will trickle down to the rest of Chinese society: a new form of cultural revolution. ‘When I say I’m starting an etiquette school the first thing people say to me is, “Thank you. China needs this,” ’ she says.