I took the cramming school, the conveyor belt approach to learning to drive. As a passed and stamped graduate of the Oriental Fashion Driving School, I'm relieved that I no longer have to get up at 5 o'clock for a 7-to-12 seat behind the wheel at Oriental's sprawling complex near the Marco Polo Bridge in Fengtai, Beijing's southwestern district of garages, cheap apartments and enough cheap land for two of China's biggest driving schools.

A late presence behind the wheel, I took up driving in China because I wanted to practice, safely, before taking my driving test back home in Europe.

Depending on whom you ask, there are between 100 and 150 driving schools in Beijing. Oriental Fashion is a top-three player: it sponsors the weather show on Beijing TV. It's also the only school allowed to take foreigners as students.

So after a medical exam--a 2-minute sight test--I did what millions of Chinese are doing every day, I learned to drive.

I paid my money down, but it'd be another month before I could get behind the wheel of a car. I wasn't told that you've first got to pass a theory exam, which comes last in European and American driving test centers. A book of theory was torturously translated; particularly on who should first pass whom on a slippery hill.

It took two visits to the marble-swathed offices of the road traffic police before I exceeded the minimum 90 percent required to pass. My Siberian fellow examinee still hasn't mastered the rules of China's road in Cyrillic, after three exams.

Driving instructors at home are self-employed with potbellies that collect you from your house in a small red hatchback car with an L-plate on top. At Oriental Fashion, I was usually No. 505--one of the cars lined up in neat rows of silver and white Volkswagen sedans in a giant asphalted car park.

Everything at Oriental Fashion was about order and scale. The giant canteen sat 1,000 drivers and their tutors. The fleet of buses ferried them to Fengtai every morning and home again after class. The billiards room and the motel were for relaxation. It was impossible to know who'd want to stay in this part of town.

Tutors here have potbellies too, but tucked into a uniform of blue shirts and synthetic gray blue slacks hitched up high on click-buckled belts the