Awake before dawn so that the three-hour drive back to Lijiang still puts us there before breakfast, all the better to get a day out of it. But nobody knows what day to have. We need something Naxi-related and preferably fertility related, and the best Mack can rustle up is an afternoon masterclass in pictograms with Mr He, our favourite wizard. So we do some driving shots around Baisha and select a restaurant to charm so that we can use their upstairs room as a jury-rigged studio. We end up in a place that has its own micro-brewery, with predictable results.

Somewhat merrier, we set up for the wizard, who has come to teach me some of the Naxi pictograms – the world’s only living hieroglyphic script. We start with some simple ones like house, man, and family, and soon progress to more complex ones like the various words for animal or a particular kind of sacred mountain. I ask him how the Naxi handle modern inventions, and he takes a new piece of paper to show me the words for aeroplane, television and computer.

Fine, I say, you can draw an aeroplane. But what about the wizard down the road?

Oh, says Mr He, there’s a dongba council that rules on the correct way to draw new words. So we all draw them that way.

We finish up with him writing a sentence in hieroglyphics and asking me to translate it. It contains seven characters, only two of which he has taught me, so I have to wing it. The seventh is “home” and the sixth is a man on two lines, which I guess means “walk”. The second is river and the fourth looks almost exactly like the Chinese character for rice paddy, while the fifth is a man who appears to be carrying a bag.

“Crossing the river,” I say, “I harvest crops and return home.”

Not crops, he says, “corn”, but he is plainly impressed. But this is how I have been reading Chinese for twenty years. It wouldn’t be the first time I had to deduce meaning from a sentence with only two reference points.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E04), 2018.