Today, we will log five minutes of footage. The day starts at 0500 and finishes for me at 2200. Every single moment takes a million negotiations, as the English director struggles against jet lag, and the Chinese director, who looks 12 but is actually 34, struggles to continue to make the documentary that he has been unchallenged about for the last few weeks before the foreigners arrived.

Today, all we have to do is film Yan Weixing, who looks uncannily like George Takei, make a deep-fried sweet and sour fish in his kitchen. But the lights have to come from the van, and the sound man has to mic me up, and then the director wants me to change my shirt, and then the B cameraman needs to change his battery, and the filmic world’s ever true cliché of Hurry up and Wait comes true again and again. I read the entire works of Confucius while waiting for my next call on the sheet, and Mr Yan smokes his way through an entire packet of Nanjing fags.

Meanwhile the Chinese director has his own ideas of what things should be, and really doesn’t want foreigners to interfere. Mr Yan and I are in the kitchen, and he is scraping the scales off a carp and slicing a series of incisions into it before rubbing it with salt. The heat in the kitchen is ridiculously high, and the sweat is pouring off us. He makes a batter for the fish and a delicate sweet and sour sauce. This is Lu-cai, one of the “Eight Great Cuisines of China“, and while Cantonese, and Sichuan and the like have made it abroad, nobody really knows much about the delicate flavours of the land of Confucius. Lu-cai used to be all the rage in Beijing until the 1950s, when Mao’s fetish for chilis and an entrepreneur’s willingness to open a Sichuan restaurant in the capital changed the world of Chinese cooking.

A bunch of diners are waiting for us to bring the fish. They have been waiting for three hours. They want to put a mini GoPro camera on the fish as I bring it into the restaurant so that we get a fish-eye view. I open the door and enter, proclaiming in Chinese to much applause: “Here is your Yellow River Carp!” The director makes me do it another six times. Then we have to do the sitting with the diners, six times. Then me asking about the seating arrangements six times. Then they offer me some Sea Cucumber Liqueur. We need to film it again, six times. I have drunk half a liquidised sea cucumber by this point.

We need to shoot the whole scene again, without lights, because the drone team will shoot it from outside the window in the dark. We have a drone team? Yes, they are three guys who have been sitting outside all day waiting for their moment to shine. We drink more sea cucumber liqueur and the drone crashes into a nearby balcony. But they have the shot.

It is 2200. Tomorrow’s call is 0515. I am in a hotel where prostitutes put business cards under the doors. Tomorrow I will be somewhere else by dinner time.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Confucius: A Biography. These events appeared in Shandong: Land of Confucius (2018).