The Chinese director seems oddly solicitous with me today. I think he has worked out that although I appear to be lurking, silently like an idiot, at the edge of all negotiations, when my time comes, I am ready to go. It makes a huge difference to him, when his crew take two hours to set up a shot, that I can get it done in five minutes.

We end the day down on the rocky coast at Qingdao, catching the sunset behind the old colonial buildings from the days of the German concession, and across the shining buildings of the modern city. The film-makers are somewhat demob-happy after thirteen hours at work (in fact, the day starts at 0530 and I do not get to type this in a hotel until 2345), and we giggle at the sight of the sound crew trying to lug their hostess trolley across three hundred yards of boulders.

Jiuqing the producer dips her hands into a rock pool and shows me what she has caught.

“I have a shrimp,” she says, before carefully returning the small creature to its home.

The A-crew and the B-crew both have their respective cameras pointed in different directions. The C-crew with the drone lurk in the van, secure in the knowledge that it is too windy for them to fly their machine, particularly after its sojourn in a temple tree-top for two hours.

Our American producer, Mitch, is very impressed with Jiuqing, a lithe girl whose job as assistant director extends to keeping everybody on schedule, fixing and refixing our hotels and breakfasts and routes to location, and chivvying everybody along. During the long drive to the Qingdao beach, when he isn’t trying to teach Ruby the Interpreter how to sing Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, he discusses with Jiuqing the various options for the days ahead, and tells me that he suspects she will be managing a film company sooner rather than later. He is particularly impressed when he asks a question about a particular location, and she has a picture of the beach there in live time, within minutes.

“We have a D-crew,” she confesses. “They’re the clean-up men. They tail behind or go up ahead and snatch the sunsets and time-lapses we don’t have time for, or the magic-hour dawn material we can’t get to. They’re the ghost crew. We’re not supposed to admit they exist, but they are shooting everything we only remember to do after we’ve got back on the bus.”

And so we perch on the rocks in the wind as the sun sets over Qingdao. Someone has the bright idea of positioning a couple of marine items in the foreground on the rocks, as the sun sets behind them, and Jiuqing dashes off excitedly, returning with her hands gently cupped over two critters.

“I HAVE CRABS!” she shouts to the world.

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