Lei Daijun can barely believe he is here. Standing in Red Square, the 74-year-old former teacher from central China gazes forlornly at the Kremlin walls, the palatial façade of the famous arcaded department store GUM, and the gingerbread-style State Historical Museum. More than half a century ago in China, as a Russian language student, Lei marvelled at these sights on the pages of his textbooks. Now he has come to Russia for the first time. With his wife, two daughters, son-in-law and two grandchildren, he is touring Moscow and St Petersburg for two weeks.

While his nine-year-old granddaughter You Qian poses for photographs, Lei listens attentively to the Russian tourists milling around him. “I cannot understand anything they are saying,” he says, disappointed. “Back then, in university, I mastered Russian. Although it was hard in the beginning, I mastered it. But now it’s all gone.”

Lei’s education, like that of millions of other Chinese of his generation, was heavily influenced by the literature, films and music of the Soviet Union, then Beijing’s closest ally. But an ideological split between the two Communist powers in the late 1950s scarred their relationship for decades to come. Now, caught in an angry stand-off with Europe and America, Russia has conspicuously turned east. Vladimir Putin and the Chinese president Xi Jinping have met more than a dozen times since 2013, when Xi chose Russia for his first foreign trip as president. Last year it was Xi who sat at Putin’s side during Russia’s 70th anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Putin has declared that Russian-Chinese relations are “on the rise and undergoing the best period in their centuries-long history”.