Up at 0630 for the two-hour drive around the lake to the village where Yang Shaohua has his gallery and workshop. I blunder in late, thanks to having the wrong address, and find him holding court around a posh tea table, chuffing on a water pipe like a giant bronze bong.

Mr Yang is handsome and charming, knowledgeable and talented. I know that sounds like me buttering up some Party bigwig, but he knows the bronze-casting process so well that he can give a ten-minute speech in answer to a simple question about how it’s done. He knows everything from the chemical formulae to the metallurgy mix, and he doesn’t just cast the bronze, but carves the models and draws the original concept artwork. He is also a great host, faffing with his tea paraphernalia while the crew smokes fags in his gallery, so much so, that we seem to lose over an hour during the day to tea.

Mr Yang is responsible for a lot of the statues I have marvelled at in Chinese public spaces, including the giant golden phoenix in front of the Yunnan Provincial Museum. He tells me about the three-metre Mother of Dragons he made for a temple to the Baiyi people’s famous rain goddess, and his biggest-ever Buddha, a ten-metre effigy for a temple somewhere. At the moment, he is working on soldiers for the Songshan military memorial, although when he leads me into the modelling room, I am surprised to find four life-sized clay men standing to attention in puttees, pith helmets and Hitler moustaches.

“They are Japanese devils,” he explains. “They get a lot of Japanese tourists there, so I suppose it does no harm to give them something to take a selfie with.” The Japanese soldiers all have real shoelaces and stitching, because it’s easier to do that and let the wax mould take an impression from the real thing, than it is to painstakingly carve them.

Since he is an official Intangible National Treasure, the Propaganda Bureau are all over this one like a rash. A beaming woman in clacking heels keeps ruining the sound recording, while her minion with a clicky camera keeps wandering into the background of every shot.

“A cameraman,” mutters our director, “of all people, should know not to ruin someone else’s shot.” She is particularly annoyed because Propaganda are insisting on “entertaining” us at a lunch banquet, which gives us only an hour to shoot our interview before we are dragged off to a restaurant with eleven other people, and forced to make small talk with a bunch of local officials only there for the free boondoggle, who manage to piss me off from the get-go by asking me if I can use chopsticks.

Bearing in mind that I had walked into the room, introduced myself in Mandarin, and embarked upon a conversation about Bronze Age culture in south-west China, I think my “of course” was an object lesson in tact. The last thing I want is chili fish-head soup for lunch, and the last thing our director needs is an hour ripped out of her shooting schedule a mere hour after we started.

Mr Yang, in the meantime, is having a whale of a time talking to us about his work, which often involves reproductions of Dian Kingdom artefacts. The museum people, in fact, have so much trust in him that they have let him digitally scan all the Dian Kingdom finds, and he does a roaring trade in replicas of the Famous (not that famous) Cow and Tiger Table.

He warms to me right away when I correctly identify a taotie totem beast on a replica Shang cauldron, and immediately ask him if a stylised goat was made for Yuexiu park in Guangzhou. I am, in fact, able to tell him that I have seen several of his statues in various parts of China.

“Do you need a bronze bust of yourself?” he asks. “I can knock one up for £3,000.”

No, I say. Nobody is interested in seeing my bust.

It’s not the easiest of days, because shooting in a foundry next to a building site is a non-stop cacophony that plays havoc with the sound. Nor do we have footage of several parts of the process, including the all-important molten bronze bit – we are trusting Mr Yang to send us something shot with his phone. It doesn’t help that the gallery has three mangy guard dogs who have industriously shat everywhere. But Mr Yang shows me how to pour wax into the mould to make my very own Famous (not that famous) Cow and Tiger Table.

The wax is then wrapped in clay, and the clay mould thus formed is heated until the wax flows away, leaving space for the molten bronze.

“Of course,” he says, “back in the old times they used beeswax, but these days we use the industrial variety.”

The word for honey in Old Chinese is an Indo-European import, mjit (as in mead), implying that honey husbandry, like chariots, is something that came into China with foreign settlers sometime in the Bronze Age. And that means that the Bronze Age itself could also very likely have been something imposed on the Chinese by foreign invaders – mysterious elites like those Dian warriors.

“Oh, I’m not surprised,” says Clicky the Cameraman from Propaganda, as we sit around the tea table for yet another break. “I mean, there’s a whole foreign city under the water of the lake here. They found it when they were laying cables for the power plant, and the government banned anyone from investigating further.”

The underwater city in Fuxian Lake was supposedly carbon-dated to 250 BC, around the time of the Dian Kingdom, but our director refuses to believe it. She suspects that the whole thing was a hoax thought up by local students to promote tourism in the region. “Not really,” claims Clicky from Propaganda. “The reason there hasn’t been any news about it since 2007 is that we’ve put a blanket ban on talking about it.”

Mr Yang doesn’t want us to leave. He lures us back to the tea table for another cup, and then points out that because we have a two-hour drive home and it’s already six, we might as well stay in town for dinner.

“I know of a lovely place nearby that does traditional peasant food,” he promises. It’s only when we are standing outside that he proudly announces: “The specialties are fish-head soup and tripe.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E03 (2019).