I must be getting good at this. Driving back to the Wastes of Yin, I know more about the site than the crew, because I already shot here once before. So I can direct the car and the van to the right institute, and point out Dr He, because I’ve met him before, and I can tell them that the meeting room is not the ideal place, because there is a warehouse upstairs full of relics that is more photogenic. I can also point out that if they want to get the lens really close to an oracle bone, Dr He has a bunch in a box that he will literally hold up to the camera.

Dr He remembers me from the Chinese chariot shoot a couple of years ago, and so he is immediately at ease and merry. When it comes to the interview, in front of boxes marked HUMAN TEETH, DOG BONES, HUMAN BONES, COW HORNS etc., we rattle through in a single long take. I quiz Dr He about the problems of reassembling oracle bones, and the fun he had tunnelling through a Sui dynasty tomb and a Han dynasty tomb in order to get to the Shang stuff two metres down. He tells me that the size of the turtle plastrons used in divination usually suggest that they came from the river, but some of them were so big that they were liable to be sea turtles, thereby suggesting that the Shang dynasty had trade links as far away as Malaysia.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there was some Malaysian Marco Polo who travelled all the way to Anyang. These things might have taken decades to drift from village to village until they ended up in the Shang capital. Dr He rattles on non-stop for 45 minutes, which delivers us 90 minutes of footage on two cameras. Time for the pick-ups and then we are out, as if we knew what we were doing.

Turtles are important, says Dr He, because they lived so long, but also as Sarah Allan has argued in The Shape of the Turtle, because they may have signified the shape of the cosmos to the ancient Chinese – a north, south, east and west around a central plain, and in the sky, a big dome overhead.

The Shang people were a bloodthirsty bunch. The Shang dynasty is the most popular topic among Chinese heavy metal groups, because after you hear about all the incest, human sacrifice and torture of the Shang kings, biting the head off a bat looks a bit everyday and soft. The on-site museum has trouble skirting around the fact that their royal graves are full of dead children, chucked in to keep them company in the afterlife, along with dismembered dogs and the usual dead horses, and a special ceremonial axe used for beheading enemies. I’ve read the oracle bones, so I know already about the boiled heads, burned slave-girls and other atrocities littering their tombs.

We finish up in the tomb of Lady Fuhao, the female general who led the armies of the late Shang, wife, or possibly sister, or possibly both to the king Wuding, who entirely by chance turns out to be the guy we know most about because Anyang was the site of oracle bone pits dating from his era. Fuhao’s tomb was miraculously undisturbed; she was buried not only with her signature C-shaped dragon rings and a gaggle of dead slaves, but a collection of bronzes that were already quite ancient when they went into the ground. Some of Fuhao’s bronzes were specifically cast as grave goods (we know this, because they included her posthumous title), but others were seemingly part of what today we would have to call her antique collection.

I felt today that I was really earning my money, and that the crew were really on top form snatching footage, sometimes, when the drone was up, with three cameras running at the same time. What with all the shooting on 4K resolution, as future-proofing against TV channels that might insist on higher quality film in future, we are generating two or three terabytes of data every week. Michelle the assistant producer has to stay up each night uploading it to a server in Hong Kong so the editors can get to work.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening, SO5E02.

The National Museum of Chinese Writing looks like a newly landed alien spaceship, decked out with golden animal totems shining in the sun, and supported by striking red columns, the fabled taotie mythical beast that shows up on so many Shang-era cauldrons. The museum is in Anyang, of course, because Anyang was where archaeologists uncovered vast pits of broken turtle shells, inscribed with questions to the gods for the Shang dynasty rulers – a peek inside their archaic Google history, if you like.

It’s also closed today, so we technically have the place to ourselves, although a bunch of surly cleaners and key-jangling security guards seem keen to ruin any quiet moments that we might have. The director films me walking among the oracle bones, and I manage a couple of relatively long pieces to camera about the story of the discovery of the Wastes of Yin, and how Chinese history got 600 years added to itself practically overnight in 1928 after the discoveries in Anyang proved that the ancient stories were actual history and not a myth.

Ms Han is a happy lady who seems very animated and passionate about oracle bones, and subjects us to a 45-minute salvo of words about the meaning of the 150 most easily identifiable characters. She doesn’t seem to have been interviewed on camera before, and is fretful about “saying the right thing.” We have to explain to her what an interview is, which is to say that I will ask her questions, which she will answer. She seems to think that we will want her to give a one-hour lecture to the camera about her work. No, we insist, I will just ask her about stuff.

On several occasions, Clarissa the fixer has to practically walk her through the answer that we expect before she will deliver it, even though she just delivered it, word-perfect, off camera. Like a lot of Chinese academic interviewees, she has trouble understanding that we are supposed to be having a conversation, and it becomes easier to just mike her up, not tell her the camera is running, and let her talk away without the chance to get nervous. By the end, the director just wants us to walk through the museum gallery talking, but we keep stopping at displays to talk about the origin of the various characters, and the director shouts at us to keep bloody walking instead of finding out about things.

“Jonathan, stop being interested!” she yells from the other end of the gallery.

But I think Ms Han is enjoying herself. After previously saying that she could only fit us in on Monday afternoon, she has suddenly freed up all of tomorrow morning to invite us over to her college to sit in on a class, so I think she is starting to feel like a bit of a celebrity.

Ms Han’s faculty at Anyang Normal University is built around another museum of Chinese writing, which is far more immersive and engaging than yesterday’s. It’s got all sorts of fun art installations, including a four-wall display of animated characters that can be filmed playing across my face and surrounding me like a veritable sea of words. There are even life-sized statues based on ancient Chinese writing, such as the stick figure holding two oxtails that was the origin of the Chinese word for “dance”.

The Sea of Words, for those not part of the Chinese community, is the name of a famous dictionary of Chinese characters. I have a copy that used to belong to “Uncle” Don Rimmington of the Leeds University Department of East Asian Studies, although I am not sure he knows it ended up with me.

The university also have a little area where students can carve their own oracle bones, leading me to have a nice half-hour with a guy called Zhang, who patiently talks me through the process. He is very excited to see that I am deliberately getting things wrong so that he can correct the way I hold my chisel and the way I hold the bone. Unlike his teacher, Ms Han, he comes to realise that I am doing it to make him look smarter, and not that I am just irredeemably stupid.

Ms Han talks me through the simplest of characters from the Shang dynasty, the most basic 150 of which are simply pictograms.

“The Shang people tried to tag the simple points of difference between similar objects,” she explains. “So what is it that makes a cow different..?”

This is a difficult question to answer in Chinese when I don’t know the word for udders.

“The… nipples?” I suggest.

“No, you stupid boy. Everything has nipples. Cows have horns and a long face. Not like the goat, which has different horns, but still has nipples.”

All right, then. And the horse has a mane and a tail, and a tiger has a stripe. I get her giggling about some of my weirder guesses, and she gets so excited that she starts shouting “NO!” in English every time I get something wrong.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening, S05E02.