Zibo is famous for glass. It’s where they make the glass vases with paintings on the inside, and the ones with the different coloured coating that’s carved into the outside. The glass flowers that form vast corporate installations, and the horrible little paperweights and dust-collectors beloved of many a mad old lady.

Li Daxi loves glass. He loves its malleability and the speed with which he can put together a vase or a figurine. This wiry, friendly man shoves a metal pole into a furnace at 1400 degrees, withdrawing it with a hot blob at the end, and he sits at a chair made of scaffolding where he can roll the blog and pat it with a trowel, where he can blow into it and tap it.

“Today,” he says, “we’re going to make a fish.” He taps and rolls the first blob, and as it cools to 800 degrees, the white hot gunge congeals to a bright red. Belatedly, I see the signs that hang on each of the furnaces – “Tea”, “Red”, “White Jade.” The true colours only manifest as it cools, but while the red blob is still too hot to touch, he dunks it into another molten bucket marked as Transparent.

I roll the hot blob for him on the scaffold chair while he sets about the clear outer layer with tongs and clippers, teasing it into fins, shaping a fish’s head and poking two little eyes into it. It’s done in less than five minutes, and yours for thirty pounds. He lets me have a go and my first fish looks more like a dinosaur. The second is more like a teapot. The third is a fish.

Li Daxi is a certified master of glass, and he leads me around the gallery in the factory, in the company of four eager students. They have been scooped up from the local polytechnic, and arrived unaware that they were going to be on television. It’s only as we stand there waiting for a lens change that I decloak as a Chinese speaker, and they suddenly burst into animated conversation about what this show is, and why we’re here. Belatedly, they realise that Li Daxi’s comments on their hand-drawn designs, and my tin-eared questions about them, are going to be broadcast in 30 countries. Everybody is very excited, and intrigued by the process of television, and boggled to discover that their taxes are being funnelled by their local government into putting a film crew in their factory to make a five-minute advert for it.

“Your job is so hard,” says Li, whose arm I have just watched tan in front of me as he holds his pole in the furnace for slightly too long. “So much standing up, and repeating yourself, and running backwards and forwards.”

But his job is hard, too, as he attests, revealing that the youngest student he has is in his thirties.

What about those nice young men this morning, I ask.

“Oh, they were all designers. They come with ideas for vases and jugs, but they still expect someone else to make them. They come to me and I tell them the handle won’t support the weight, or that the whole thing will have to be exterior-cut or interior-painted, but they won’t do any of that themselves. Nobody wants this job. The heat is incredible, every day. We wear asbestos gloves, we’re throwing around molten glass…”

The day started at 0530. By sunset, we are filming the pick-ups of me arriving at the factory and doing a rushed piece to camera in front of a sunset that we are hoping will pass for a sunrise. Then it’s back indoors after the light fails, to film me and Mr Li looking around the gallery and talking about his favourite pieces. We wrap at 1830, then there’s just time for a rushed dinner before the four-hour drive to Qufu, the home of Confucius.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Shandong: The Land of Confucius (2018).

This morning, all I have to say is this: “Because of its proximity to large bodies of water, Nanchang became a vital centre for inland shipping. One of the most important commodities was porcelain, as reflected in the design of this shopping mall. But in recent years, Nanchang has become the focus of a massive archaeological dig that has uncovered one of the most complete finds of Han dynasty relics. I’m going to the provincial museum to find out more.”

The wording is very precise. I cannot make definite pronouncements without two printed sources, so every word is carefully chosen, but it’s carefully chosen by a director from Singapore who has changed her mind three times about the precise speech, even as I am trying to learn it.

If you want a taste of the presenting life, I’ll give you two minutes to memorise the above. But then you need to get in a car and drive down a public street, with cars overtaking from both sides, mopeds illegally flying in the face of the traffic, and gaggles of women in mustard yellow puffa jackets blundering blindly into the road, sometimes at the zebra crossing, sometimes not. And then deliver the speech while operating heavy machinery.

Every time someone beeps a horn, you have to start again. Every time you stop, you have to start again. Every time you overshoot the shopping mall you are supposed to be pointing at, you have to start again, which involves making a semi-legal U-turn and repositioning the car at the other end of the road.

Congratulations, you got it right first time. Except there is no memory card in the audio deck, so you need to go back to the hotel, pick up a memory card, and do it again. And the grips are at the side of the road, wildly gesticulating at you to turn your lights on, because Buick didn’t give you a stand-out red car, but a pointlessly drab brown one and it’s difficult for the B-camera to pick you out from the traffic.

Start again.

Today’s main event is a trip to the Coin Museum, which is a tough sell. Coins can present fascinating data about past times – they are little nuggets of crystallised history, imparting details of everything from the date something was put in the ground, to the image of an emperor, to the aspirations of that emperor, to the economic conditions at the time it was minted. In some cases, like the Greek heirs of Bactria, numismatics is the only clue we have to the names of the kings and their likely reign periods. But if you fill up room after room with the same bloody things, it is very difficult to make it look like fun on camera.

Mr Jin doesn’t pay much attention to me until we are shooting a pre-amble around his museum, and I ask an innocent question about Wang Mang spade money. Like the metadata around a coin, it tells him a bunch of things all at once – that I know who the hell Wang Mang was, which means I understand the politics of the switch between the Eastern and Western Han dynasties, occasioned by a cousin-usurper.

Suddenly, he is much more animated, dragging me over to show me the tiny “goose-eye” coins. I say they remind me of Ancient Greek obols, and I think he is ready to kiss me.

In fact, we have trouble shutting Mr Jin up. He mentions that Jiangxi TV have offered him a 26-episode TV show, called something like Fun With Coins, and the director archly suggests that they asked him a single question and were obliged to split his answer across thirteen hours. From the way he seems chronically unable to hold anything so that the camera can see it, I suspect that he doesn’t really have much of an audience for his coin fetish, and it takes multiple efforts to get him to understand the nature of a drop-in close-up to explain something that he has already said.

It takes some wrangling and multiple explanations, but eventually the director gets him to understand that she wants him to test me by handing me a bunch of genuine and fake coins. So fun is finally had, as I try to work out which coins have been buried in soil with north Chinese acidity, which in soil with south Chinese acidity, and which have been artificially defaced with artificial oxidising agents. Which ones are too thin, or two thick, which ones have unfiled edges, which ones have the characters in the wrong place. I successfully identify three out of five fake coins, although in my defence, after talking for three hours about the Han dynasty, he showed me a haul halfly comprising coins from the post-Han period.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E04 (2019).