Yufang, the instigator of the infamous “OKAY, OKAY” dance, has invited us out into the countryside to witness a qingshen ceremony, in which the gods are invited into someone’s home. The director accepts, figuring it will be more shamanic mentalism.

Yufang and her long suffering husband live in a single-room cottage two hours outside of Songyuan, next to a pig sty, and with a back yard that swiftly turns into a field of maize. Their single room is dominated by a kang, a traditional Chinese heated dais that functions
as central heating, stone sofa and warmed-up bed – I lie on it, enjoying the sense of history and attracting the unwelcome attentions of the local cat. There’s plainly not a lot to do out here in the countryside. Yufang, along with all the other people we meet here, has an odd notch in one of her front teeth, which I first mistook for a shamanic initiation symbol.

“Oh no,” she giggles, tapping her gappy tooth. “That’s where we bite on the husks of sunflower seeds. It wears down over the years.”

It slowly sinks in that the foreign idiots she has invited to her house are actually a film crew, and that far from merely hanging out with us to prolong the fun from our days in Songyuan, she will actually be appearing on camera. The interview is postponed for five minutes while she slaps on some lippy. In all our dealings with the shamans, Yufang has been the clown and the Head of Morale, ever ready with an impersonation or a piss-take to liven things up when we’re standing around in the cold waiting for Mickey the drone pilot to warm up his batteries. But when the camera is pointed at her, she is suddenly all business, prim and serious.

“There’s no way I can make a living here as a shaman,” she sighs, gesturing outside her window at the tiny huddle of nearby houses. “Maybe if I was in the big cities, there would be more work, but less people in the big cities actually believe in this.”

I am not sure that all that many of the locals believe it in, either. The neighbours soon gather to gawp, standing not only around the Buick as the crew try to film me, but wandering unbidden into the house, where they have no compunction about hawking up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it onto Yufang’s kitchen tiles.

Yufang shows me her shamanic credentials, since Gorlos shamans are now accredited by the government, and also by the committee that runs an annual wizard school at Changbaishan, (Long White Mountain) on the border with Korea. There are nine grades to attain, none of which have anything to do with actual religious belief at all. Instead, the government recognises shamanism as a cultural performance, and insist on shamans achieving acceptable levels in dance classes, paper cutting, knife walking, costume, and sundry other handicrafts.

These include drum-making, which Yufang’s long-suffering husband (I think it’s fair to add the prefix “long-suffering” to all the witches’ husbands I have met) has apparently got himself a qualification in. He shows me a rancid bucket in which a sheep’s skin has been soaking for several days.

“The hairs are much easier to pull out if you soak it for a couple of days,” he says brightly. “And the bonus is that in winter it doesn’t smell so much.”

Yufang’s husband and I sit glumly pulling hairs from the wet skin in the bucket, which feels like I am sticking my hand into the cold bathwater of an entire pack of wild dogs.

We then piss about hammering designs into the metal crown, but the sun is already setting and our hearts aren’t really in it. Yufang is already cooking dinner, ready for the big event, which will be a four-way qingshen after dark.

A crowd gathers. The entire village empties itself of a bunch of wizened crones and tubby men, with a couple of hot-looking yummy mummies and a one-eyed granny, all of whom pile into Yufang’s kitchen and start staring variously at either the shamans or the film crew. For once, the director doesn’t call for quiet, but gets me to do a piece to camera in the middle of all the hubbub, surrounded by snickering yokels who believe my name is Foreigner.

The shamans start chanting and skipping in circles, spinning ever more wildly. In each case, the person to be possessed is the only one in full finery, including the all-important beaded fringe that hides the host’s eyes from incoming spirits. The first up is a woman I refer to as Wallflower, who seems very quiet, but has always gamely jumped into all the ceremonies, and has been there for everyone. As the door to the icy fields outside is opened, she spins and whirls, her arms suddenly outstretched in an imitation of wings.

She throws herself back onto the kang, and sits there panting, and growling repeatedly: “FIRE! FIRE! FIREFIREFIRE!” Yufang’s husband lights a fag and hands it to her, and she smokes the whole thing down in seconds, rotating it rapidly as she puffs. Suddenly, when most of the cigarette is ashes, she flips it around and sticks it in her mouth, chewing on the ashes and the lit embers and chasing them with a few mouthfuls of the local hooch. She whispers a few words in guttural hisses to Yufang, revealing that she is an Eagle Spirit who has popped in to see what’s happening, and then she announces that she is leaving.

She jumps to her feet, spinning and flapping again, and two men position themselves by the open door, to stop her flying away along with the soul inside her. Wallflower charges at ramming speed straight for the door, but she is physically stopped while, we are told, the Eagle spirit flies from her mouth. The room is quiet once more, except for the sound of Wallflower retching and throwing up on the doorstep, as you might well do if you’d gargled a lit fag with a vodka chaser.

Next up is Red – not her real name, just what I have ended up calling her – a sour-faced old lady with a ginger dye job, who similarly dances in circles and similarly welcomes an eagle spirit. But when she grabs a lit fag, she immediately inverts it and puts the lit end in her mouth and blows, which turns out to have an effect not unlike a smoke machine. Then, she is also hunched over the doorstep, throwing up.

Yufang is next, and apparently receives the spirit of her own grandfather, who doesn’t have much to say, but does neck an awfully large amount of booze before coughing a lot and growling.

Afterwards, there is a break when Yufang asks to see the director’s monitor, as she has never seen what happens to her when she is in a trance. She stands there, clutching the small TV as Daniel plays back from the camera. She shakes and weeps at the sight and sound of her grandfather’s spirit.

The last of the women is simply called October, a name of such startling lack of interest that it suggests an entire lifetime lived as a parental afterthought. She turned to shamanism in her late thirties after an unspecified illness, and reports that she, too, had no interest in it until it cured her. Shamanism has plainly given her something to shine at, and she is the big finish, in which she will not merely invite a spirit to pop into her body for a bit, but will actually swap souls with it for a while. This looks not unlike the process from before, except she flings herself around with somewhat gayer abandon, and doesn’t ask for any fags, which is a relief, because the place is starting to smell like a fire in a sofa factory. Instead, she downs three quarters of a bottle of firewater, makes a few bibbling noises, and jumps up to her feet. The two catchers rush to stand guard at the door, and October makes a run for it, but is so munted by this point that she actually misses the door by three or four feet, instead running straight into the wall next to it, and bouncing off like a drunken clown with a gold crown and rainbow streamers, smelling of hard liquor and carrying a tambourine… if you can imagine that.

The day before, I had joked with Mandula the musician that his 20-a-day habit must be have been a boon for throat singing. “Oh yes,” he replied, straight-faced. “And so is booze.”

I bring this up because one of the unique selling points of shamanic performances is that the women suddenly speak with the voice of men, which, I suggest to you, is easier if you’ve just smoked three tabs in a row, stuck the last one into your mouth while still lit, and gargled with a bottle of industrial-strength vodka. I will also observe the odd way that Wallflower smoked her cigarette, twisting and twisting as she puffed… possibly an odd spirit-world affectation, but perhaps more likely to be a way of keeping all the ashes balanced in place, instead of allowing them to fall on the floor before she could stick them in her mouth. In other words, an oddly organised approach from someone supposedly in a trance.

Michelle our associate producer was very impressed with it all, and as an exorcist’s daughter, she is usually the crew’s go-to girl for spiritual matters. But I found the whole thing to be an elaborate carnival of parlour tricks and stunts, performed rather than enacted, by a bunch of women who can pack the whole village into their living room if they purport to be consorting with talking eagles. The sceptical reader might also note the degree to which Yufang was waving around her stack of credentials from the Long White Mountain School of Wizards, which strikes me as about as useful as a loathsome “Team-Building Exercise” in a Northampton adventure playground.

But there was something about the look on her face as she watched herself on the monitor, and the tears on her cheeks as she heard her grandfather’s voice, that made me doubt myself.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E03), 2018.

Mr Bao has turned up in a long Mongol robe with a trilby perched incongruously on the top. He is here to talk about the intangible cultural heritage of Mongol epics, which he sings and talks through while playing a sihu.

The sihu is a fiddle-like instrument, like the erhu, with a soundbox at the base, a long shaft held perpendicularly, and four strings, played by a double-stringed bow so that two strings are sounding at any one time. Mr Bao’s performance includes a bunch of little tricks, adding vibrato by shaking the shaft rather than the strings, adding a drumbeat by clicking the edge of his bow on the soundbox while he fiddles, and flicking the strings to make them thrum. All the while he sings and yells through the story of Toqta-Temur, the last non-Muslim leader of the Golden Horde and the great-great-great grandson of Genghis Khan. Toqta spent a large part of his “reign” fighting off civil war with other Mongols and insurgencies by the peoples of Eastern Europe, which leaves plenty of time in his epic to talk about his attacks on the Russians his war with his cousin and former ally, Nogai, to whom he had once rashly given the Crimea.

Late in his reign, around 1304, he and his cousins accepted the authority of the grandson of Khubilai Khan, thereby restoring peace to the Mongol Empire that had, in fact, not been peaceful at all at any previous point. He declared war on Italian merchants in the Caucasus, and eventually married a weeping teenage bride, Maria Palaeologus, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. But none of us get much of the above, because Mr Bao is singing in Mongol.

Late in the day, we relocate to the Mandula music school, where a man called Mandula leads the Mandula band. It’s a proper hothouse for the musically gifted. Lessons start at half past seven each morning, with normal schooly-type stuff up to lunchtime. From one o’clock to half past eight each afternoon, the tuition is entirely musical. Mandula is something of a teddy boy, favouring a long purple coat and well-polished winkle-pickers, as well as an impressive mohican. He has something of the rock star about him, but has accreted an impressive array of students – a bunch of youths playing erhus and sihus, as well as a statuesque singing girl in a searingly white slinky dress and a Mongolian dildo hat, several drummers, a man who plays an instrument made from a string of sheep’s kneebones, and a gaggle of groupies. This last group seems to serve no actual purpose, but clutter up the practice hall, sneaking photographs of the camera crew on all occasions. I am sure that within a few weeks, framed pictures of the National Geographic crew will join those already on the wall of his students with various C-list celebrities, and/or clutching prizes for princely sums like £10.

We shoot them playing a 20-minute set that I wish I could have bought on CD, although sadly we will be unable to use the moment when Mandula got bored and decided to break into the Game of Thrones theme – music clearances.

I am really enjoying being with the Mongols. They are easy interviewees, talkative and friendly. One doesn’t feel that one is dealing with a hostile witness, but instead with someone who enjoys the attention and is keen to make a good impression. Mandula in particular, who has written a book of horse-head fiddle music and appeared several times on some sort of national show like China’s Got Talent, has got plenty to say for himself, and gamely tries to teach me how to do the droning Mongolian throat-singing called khöömi. It takes three months to learn, apparently, so there is not much hope of me getting it right in ten minutes, but there is plenty of fun footage of us growling at each other, bibbling our lips and impersonating goats.

Mandula then reveals that as well as leading a band of Mongols, he has attempted to integrate ancient and modern by combining khöömi with rapping. This seems too good to resist, and so the director asks him to give us a whirl. He throws his teddy boy coat behind him, where there is a minion poised ready to catch it, and launches into a beatboxing horror that sounds like a herd of goats falling down some stairs in an echo chamber.

The director gets us to finish by droning at each other: OOooooOOoooOOeeeh, OOowowooowowo, Errrrrrgle. I’ve had worse Wednesday nights.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E03), 2018.