Hongyan, the village where we have spent this week, is three hours from Lijiang. We have driven a further three hours on the winding mountain roads, which have turned into single lane tracks, and peter out here, on a precipice, above a squat, concrete dam. Two Chinese men are waiting for us in a flatbed tractor, the only vehicle that can make it up the slope and along the muddy pathways for the next half an hour before we reach our destination – a remote hilltop farmhouse where Master Peacock makes knives.

This is the second Peacock we have had to deal with here, so I shall redub him John Craven in a Lenin Hat. John Craven in a Lenin Hat doesn’t just make knives, he makes the iconic fork-topped machetes that are an iconic symbol of Lisu manhood, and even show up on the Lisu crest.

He makes them out of truck suspension springs, which turn out to be good steel even when the truck is broken up. He breaks off a piece of roughly the right size, and hammers it in his forge until it is done, firing the flames with a bellows the size and shape of a coffin, operated by a giant pump handle. I briefly step in with his son to hammer on one side of the anvil, but John Craven in a Lenin Hat doesn’t speak Mandarin, so there are no interviews to be done – most of today’s shooting is B-roll of him at work, while I sit on a rock and wait for my next 20-second piece to camera.

For lunch, his wife lays out freshly made bread and a bowl piled with oozing honeycombs. The director tries to stage a dinner scene, but the Craven in a Lenin Hat family are all petrified of me, and the set-up ends up looking like Saddam Hussein trying to be chummy with hostages.

John Craven in a Lenin Hat’s two-foot knives are rather wonderful, and very cheap here at the source, seven hours from the nearest airport. I am tempted to buy one for myself, but it is now illegal to have knives in one’s luggage, even when checked in, thanks to the Islamist knife attacks at Kunming airport a while ago. Postage restrictions are unclear, and I am not going to blow my cash on a machete that I have to dump at the airport.

The director has strictly ruled that we must leave by 3pm. It will take half an hour to get back to the car, and another three hours to get back to the village, and this evening we have to be there to watch another of our interviewees climb the Ladder of Knives and throw himself into the Sea of Fire. This is the big finale of the local show, but he can’t be arsed to perform it if there are less than 20 people in the crowd, so we have had to bribe him with 500 kuai to perform it regardless. All of which means we don’t have the time to do pick up shots of John Craven’s chickens, nor to drone among the majestic mountains, tightly clad in green firs, that tower above the shadowy, narrow valley.

But John Craven won’t let us leave. His wife has made dinner and we have to eat it or he will lose face. They’ve killed a chicken and everything. So we glumly pick our way through gizzards and feet, the director sucking on the liver, until it is decreed that we have put on enough of a performance of eating to be allowed off the mountain-top.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E04), 2018.