Everybody on the crew has a job that is as tough as mine, in their own little field, and everybody just gets on with doing it, from Little Fish, the whippet-thin soundman with his little hostess trolley of nobs and dials, to Boomer, who balances his fluffy boom mike on his head, to our angry driver Hooty, who is only happy when honking at any car in the vicinity. We’re still not sure what some of the crew do. The man who took my bag at Jinan station was called Li Tao, but I haven’t seen him since, so I assume he is part of the Ghost Crew. And there is an elegant lady we call Purple, because of her punky hair rinse, whose name tag reveals her job title as GL8. It turns out that she is the driver for the advance team, part of our crew who arrive in every location an hour ahead of any general call-up time, ready to smooth feathers and buy sandwiches.

We all have lanyards bearing a bright yellow laminated card, giving our names and positions. I always keep mine on when we reach a new location, because the security guards have often been told to wave through anyone displaying such credentials, and it saves me being mistaken for an American tourist.

Today we suddenly gained a new Drone Team, the former Drone Team having been fired for crashing their drone into a tree. We catch the ferry across the water to Changdao, Long Island, the first of the island chain that the modern Chinese tourist board has sneakily rebranded as the Isles of the Immortals. They are not the Isles of the Immortals; nobody knows where the Isles of the Immortals actually were, but now everybody with Google Maps thinks I am an idiot when I say this, because clearly they are here, near the Immortals Theme Park, and somewhere on the Immortals Island Cruise.

The ferry takes half an hour, most of which is the three-point turn required to get it out of the harbour. Honestly, I’ve taken longer in the past getting across the QE2 bridge. On the Changdao shoreline, we rustle up a fisherman, Mr Lin, who will poke around some clam pots or something. I don’t know because I am surplus to requirements, and I know the last thing that the director needs is a spare body in the fishing boat getting in the way.

The next crew member to disappear is Hooty, who walks straight into the sharp edge of a restaurant sign at lunch. The director comes out of the toilet to find the room in chaos and blood spattered across the floor, and lets out a long sigh.

We clamber into three souped-up speedboats for the short, nerve-wracking hop to Shrine Island, home to a temple to Mazu the Goddess of the Sea. It is a dilapidated disappointment, literally signposted as a “third-rate cultural monument”, and lacking the Goddess of the Sea gift shop where I had hoped to spend a bunch of the money still in my wallet.

For a day that began at 0530, I don’t stand on my mark before 1600, when the tired crew finally get around to pointing the cameras at me to ask a couple of questions of Mr Lin the fisherman, like why do you pray to Mazu? I also deliver my 20-second speech about the historical origins of the Goddess of the Sea, which goes like this:

“The legend says that she was a fisherman’s daughter, Lin Moniang, the Silent Girl. The villagers believed that she could heal the sick, see the future and even make it rain, but she seems to have thought her main duty was to protect her brothers’ fishing boats. She would put on a bright red dress, carry a lantern and stand on the clifftops like a human lighthouse, guiding them home at night. One evening, one of the boats didn’t return, and she thought it was her fault. She was last seen wading, weeping into the sea… and then the boat returned, although she never did. Since that day, Chinese sailors and fisherman have prayed to Mazu for protection.”

We’re supposed to record my speech for the end of the show here as well, except we are losing the light, and the speedboat captains want to get home for dinner. So that’s now been bumped to another day, and since we have missed the last ferry back to the mainland tonight, I am typing this to you in a third-rate Chinese hotel room, where the staff complain all the way up the stairs about how heavy our luggage is, even though they’re the ones who have a hotel with no elevator.

0630 call tomorrow, and I am in bed at nine. Such luxury.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events occurred during the filming of Shandong: Land of Confucius (2018).