Mr Hu has been meeting world leaders
If you stop people in the street in Beijing and ask them to name China's five most important political leaders many will fail to even mention Hu Jintao.
In the outside world China's vice-president is even less well known.
And yet he is the man most likely to take over as the leader of the world's most populous nation when current President Jiang Zemin steps down in a little over a year's time.
Now, Western leaders, including UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, are getting their first view of the man as he visits four European Union countries after a weekend stopover in Russia.
So who exactly is Mr Hu? It is an extremely difficult question to answer.
He is enigmatic even by the standards of China's notoriously closed and secretive communist leadership.
'Young' and intelligent
The few things we do know about him are that he is, by Chinese standards, young - only 58 years old.
He is reported to be highly intelligent, and to have an almost photographic memory.
But what he thinks and believes is much harder to say.
Some reports have dubbed him a liberal, who may push for reform of China's political system.
But there is little to indicate that from his previous career.
One of the major steps on Mr Hu's road to power was running Tibet where, as Communist Party secretary, he was ruthless in suppressing an uprising against Chinese rule in 1988.
Party apparatus
Almost all of his other posts have been within the communist party's vast apparatus.
Early on he headed the Communist youth league; more recently he has presided over the Communist Party school, training ground for China's future leaders.
Neither place is considered a hotbed of liberals.
Mr Hu's rapid rise is due in large part to China's former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.
In the early 1990s the elderly patriarch plucked Mr Hu from relative obscurity and named him as the "core" of the so called fourth generation of Chinese leaders, those who will replace the current third generation led by President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji.
In 1992 Mr Hu was suddenly catapulted from Tibet party secretary to become a member of the all-powerful Politburo standing committee.
Military commission
He has never looked back. In 1998 he was named vice-president and vice-chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission, the body that makes sure that, as Mao Zedong put it, the party controls the gun.
When President Jiang steps down as secretary-general of the Communist Party next autumn all expectations are that Vice-President Hu will take his place.
A few months later, in spring 2003, Mr Jiang will step down as president and Mr Hu will take over there too.
Or at least that is the theory.
There are still some possible stumbling blocks.
One is Mr Hu's lack of international experience.
Unlike President Jiang he has never lived abroad, and, until this week, had never even visited western Europe, let alone the United States.
His current five-nation tour is designed to set that straight and give him a chance to demonstrate his abilities as a statesman.
Who is Hu?
But none of this really answers the question: Who is Mr Hu?
The few foreign diplomats who have met him speak of a man in complete control, who can reel off reams of statistics, but who reveals almost no personality.
Some say his ability to hide his true self is one of the keys to his meteoric rise through the ranks of the Communist Party.
The question then is what will be revealed once the pinnacle of power is in his grasp.