Back up the mountain today, no clouds and tropical heat, to pick oolong tea with a bunch of old grannies, who are all wearing conical straw hats. The director thinks it would be great if I could get one, too. Do they have any spares?

There is a lot of tooth-sucking and shouting in Hokkien, and then one of them says:

“You can just put a bag over your head!”

“I’ll put a bag over your head, you cheeky c—” I begin, but the director kicks me.

A straw hat is found, and a woman shows me how to pick the leaves.

“You’re doing it wrong,” she says. “You’re just grabbing the top three leaves and snapping off the stem. That might bruise the leaves before they’re ready for processing, but more importantly, if you do that all day every day, you will sprain your fingers. You do it like this.” And she levers three leaves off the stem by lifting her arm, not her wrist. while resting the stem on her index finger. It’s a deceptively small nuance, but one of the little things that we are there to capture.

I start to explain to the camera what she said, demonstrating… until she grabs my arm and says: “No, no! You’re still doing it wrong!”

“Yes,” I say, pointing at the camera lens, “I’m showing them!” It is good television and looks very natural. One of the most difficult micro elements of filming on this show has been the public’s inability to grasp that we need to shoot everything wide and again in close-up; that even impromptu moments require a second take for reactions, and that when demonstrating something I have learned, I often need to first get it wrong again. This is not a problem on a closed set with just a few people; you can explain it and they get it. It is only a problem when a crowd gathers and gets in the way, and everyone appoints themselves an expert.

The cameraman switches to his macro lens so he can zoom right in on my fingers doing it wrong, and then doing it right. This means selecting tea buds that aren’t in shadow, and making sure we both know which one we are talking about, and then slowly rehashing the events that have already been shot at a distance, repeatedly.

However, for reasons that defy understanding, we have an audience that has swelled to eighteen people, thanks to a local fixer we call Mr Jangles because of the fistful of keys that hang from his belt. He is apparently some kind of bigwig from the Iron Guanyin Appreciation Society (don’t laugh – their online feed has 30,000 subscribers), who has decided to document our documentary by taking pictures with an outmoded Canon and his BINGBONG annoying mobile phone. The director has already shouted at him three times to get out of shot or stop jangling in the background of every scene. Plus the usual drivers and wingmen, several random tea-pickers, a guy who was passing on a motorcycle, and our entire crew, which is nine more people. Oh, and someone’s hatchet-faced Chinese girlfriend. who waits until I am halfway through the shot before yelling from the trees: “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”

I have nothing to do for hours on end, and then often a tiny window to perform every task planned, in the right framing, in the right light, with the right sound and background, without a passing motorcycle or granny with a hedge trimmer. The whole crew have done their level best not to cock everything up. All I have to do is say the words in the right order, without forgetting what they are, even though they are often in Chinese. If I get it wrong, then a light change (we are all hyper-conscious about the position of the sun, and the lag between takes is often enough for it to be palpable) or sound change will mean ten more minutes’ faffery. It wastes everybody’s time and concertinas our schedule later in the day, which will often mean a cancelled shot from the end. Time is money, and we will never return to this mountainside, so that idle heckle has just cost us a shot from the end of the day.

When I am talking to camera, I am trying to remember what I am supposed to say, obviously. A 20-second speech has to be carefully plotted so as not to accidentally imply that Taiwan isn’t part of China, or mix up oolong with pu’er, or forget to mention the right dynasty, or offend National Geographic’s Standards & Practices arbiters, who will make us throw a take away if they don’t like it. So the last thing I need is gesticulating, whispering, hand waving, or people dicking about with their phones (BINGBONG). It’s difficult enough to remember at all times to maintain eye-contact with the lens, rather than the director or cameraman, who are usually also in my line of sight, so the last thing I need is Mr Jangles poking his head out from under the tripod to try and sneak a photo.

Mr Jangles, in fact, has appointed himself the director’s assistant, and insists on “translating” anything she says and bellowing it up the hill in Hokkien. However, since he doesn’t actually speak English, he usually forgets the words “don’t” or “not”, and is the cause of several unwarranted mass exoduses of grannies, packing away of cameras, disappearing straw hats, and other continuity nightmares. But for some political reason I don’t comprehend, we can’t get rid of him, or any of the people he is shepherding around in his car. He then reveals that he has already been uploading his pictures of us straight to the internet, which is not his right to do, and technically contravenes several terms in our contracts.

I have been thinking a lot today about Gwyneth Paltrow, and the kerfuffle that once erupted after she supposedly demanded to be taken a mere few dozen metres from her trailer to the set of Shakespeare in Love in a golf cart. Some media outlets condemned this as prima-donnish behaviour, although the Clements contingent immediately noted that she was wearing an Elizabethan dress and facing a football pitch’s worth of muddy ground, so her decision was probably intended to save her wardrobe mistress three hours of late-night laundry.

Similarly, Tom Cruise is notorious for having banned extras from his eye-line on film sets. This has been regularly touted as evidence that he is quite mad, really, but I will observe that as the producer of his own films, it is his own money he is wasting if a take is ruined because someone tries to snatch a selfie, suddenly slaps a mosquito on their neck, or downloads the contents of their left nostril into a nearby ditch. If I had a way of napalming the grove of trees next to the tea plantation today, and could thereby rid myself of a bunch of jangly, muttering interlopers, I would have happily done so.

Up the mountain one more time, to shoot me carrying 40 kilos of tea on a shoulder balance, stumbling along the ancient pathway that winds through the hills to Quanzhou, the sea, and the world. The director wants to drone me alone on the hillside, which entails lugging my hefty load for half a mile through the terraces, pretending that I can’t see the Yuneec Q500 Typhoon as it whirrs above me. It then slowly pans up and out, leaving me a receding speck in the sunlight, stumbling through the neat green steps of tea trees, as the sun sets on the distant hills. This will probably be the closing shot of the whole tea episode.

There is no more time. We were supposed to record my closing homily in the sunset, but Mr Jangles and a bunch of other issues have chipped a minute here and a minute there, until we have lost an entire set-up. The sun has gone down, so it’s a 90-minute drive back into Quanzhou, livened up in the Buick by the sound of the director watching the drone footage and discovering that Mr Jangles turns up in it, trying to take a picture of me from the trees with his bloody phone.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events featured in Route Awakening S02E01 (2016).

While reading about the botanists of the early twentieth century, I stumble across a reference in the works of Joseph Rock, a man whose prose is described by his own biographer as “brutally unreadable”:

“Between Dü-gkv and Nvlv-k’ö is a meadow called Mbamä. Here a large spring called Bao-shi gko-gyi issues from the mountainside under a grove of century-old maples where Na-khi sorcerers perform Zä-mä, a ceremony for the propitiation of the Llü-mun (Serpent spirits).”

The ceremony in question supposedly grants fertility to those who drink from its waters. Mack the fixer and I puzzle over the quasi-Tibetan Romanisation, and eventually work out that the place in question is now called Xuesong – the Snow Pines. Since we have nothing better to do, and any mention of “fertility” is a step closer to successfully completing the episode, we drive over to the spring, which is now an area of sheltered parkland, in the grounds of a temple.

We walk through shady forest paths around ponds and lakes of a clarity I have never seen before. The carp in the pond seem to be floating in mid-air, and the waters are crystal clear all the way down, linked by a series of bubbling waterfalls. The park is remarkably quiet and peaceful, thanks largely to the fact that there are hardly any Chinese people in it, and we climb mossy stone steps to a little shrine in the hillside. Here, between a golden statue of the Goddess of Mercy, and a stone statue of the Earth Mother, there is a hole in the rock where the spring of the Crown Prince God bubbles to the surface, watched over by the fat effigy of a young naked boy, swaddled in red ribbons. From here it cascades down the hillside, through several ponds, around a water wheel, and then into a fountain in the temple grounds, where locals can be seen filling up with buckets. This is an ideal place to film… and it is locked.

“GO AWAY,” shouts a horrible old lady through the grille. “WE’RE CLOSED.”

You can’t be closed, reasons Mack. This shrine is the focus of the entire park and we’ve all paid twenty kuai each to get in. What time do you close if the gate is still open at the front…?

There is a long pause while the old lady thinks through the ramifications of her various possible answers, any one of which requires her admitting that her daily routine comprises of knocking off early and putting her feet up. But we have filming permission from her boss at the front gate, who plainly expects the shrine at the top of the ridge to be open for another hour, otherwise he wouldn’t have let us carry our gear up the mountain.

In a great sulk, she lets us in and then hunches over the balcony, fuming at having been caught out. I dash off a piece to camera about the spring, and we are gone. It could have been a substantially more sedate piece, with me walking in the picturesque surroundings and talking about Naxi culture, but the hostility of the “caretaker” has kind of put us off.

I wish I’d taken a picture of those fish, seemingly hovering, so you would believe me. But there is rarely time or opportunity for me to point a camera, or even carry one. I am in the car feverishly revising Mandarin technical terms for an interview, or swotting up on the next location. I am pacing up and down in a forest, trying to parse my lines. I am in a hotel room carefully trying to make sure my face and hair and clothes all look the same from day to day. Or I am thousands of miles away, trying to remember it all before it fades.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S03E05 (2017).

This picture was taken five years ago a conference/knees-up to celebrate twenty years of the faculty at Xi’an Jiaotong University. I’m pretty easy to spot in the front row, since I am the only white face present. I’d flown in to deliver a lecture about “The British Perspective on the Belt and Road”, which was something of an eye-opener for the audience, as I delved into the history of other nations’ outreach initiatives, and some of the likely unwelcome consequences. I predicted, accurately as it turned out, that Gwadar in Pakistan would prove to be one of the more obvious flashpoints, and that the Balochi independence movement would soon start targeting the Chinese. For saying so, I was reprimanded by an earnest Party member who didn’t think I should be rocking the boat.

The next day, I hang out with my friend Dr Qiao Zhilin, who has been racking his brains in search of a historical site in Xi’an that I had yet to see. We wander up to the city museum and then along to the Blue Dragon Temple, sited on a shoulder of land a couple of storeys above the surrounding terrain – Tang dynasty maps tend not to have contour lines, so the fact that medieval Chang-an was not as flat as a pancake often eludes scholars. The view from one of its halls would have rivalled that from the Great Goose Pagoda itself, and you would have seen the whole checkerboard of Chang-an stretching out to the north and west.

Zhilin is irritated that the view now looks like everything else. Climb the hundred or so steps to the gate, and all you can see is skyscrapers all around. The temple sat in ruins for centuries, until the place was mobbed by Japanese tourists in the 1980s. It turned out to be the place where Kukai, one of the most famous Buddhist missionaries in medieval Japan, had studied. He would return to Japan and establish the Shingon sect.

Never ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, the Chinese bodged the temple back together again, and in 1985 the people of Shikoku (Kukai’s birthplace) donated an entire forest of cherry trees, so it would look suitably Japanese every spring. Online information about the precise place where he studied is very confused. Wikipedia thinks that almost everything of any note in Buddhist history happened at the Ximing Temple, which I have never heard of, and seems to be a confused conflation of a bunch of institutions in the shadow of the Great Goose Pagoda. But Buddhist temple tourism is a fierce competition for the attention of tourists to go to a bunch of places that are all effectively the same, so the ability to say “Famous Monk Slept Here” is worth something, as is an entirely arbitrary forest of cherry trees, that only looks good for two weeks a year but is all any visitor seems to talk about.

The park is full of Chinese dicking around with badminton racquets and shuttlecocks, and a troupe of Uyghur dancers doing their hand-wavy dance thing. Nobody pays any attention to the museum in the inner temple area, although it fast becomes apparent why, as the guards have installed a loud alarm that beeps constantly if there is anyone inside. This helpfully tells them if anyone is on the premises, but makes it incredibly difficult to examine exhibits about enlightenment and harmony if you are actually there. It’s as if Westminster Abbey hired a clown with a bullhorn to stand next you and go HONK-HONK every time you looked at something.

We retreat to a sutra room near the back of the temple, where we are waylaid by a crazy-eyed security guard who wants to talk about Buddhism. Mr Yang has an odd aura about him that I remember all too well from the clientele at a religious bookshop where I once worked. He asks me “What sutras you have in England?” Diamond, I tell him. “Awesome,” he replies, “that’s my favourite sutra” and launches into a diatribe about how all religions are the same beneath the surface, and anything was okay except atheism, which was plainly a poison on the face of the Earth.

I think, I observe to Zhilin as we leave, that we’ve just met someone whose parents said he couldn’t be a Buddhist priest.

But he is just a security guard, protests Zhilin.

Is he, though? Is he?

Clinging by his fingertips to any reason not to be at the conference, Zhilin insists on accompanying me to the bullet train station, and pads after me all the way to the security gates.

“I really have nothing else to do!” he says, staying until I disappear up the escalators and he can no longer see me. At least, I assume he went home after that. Maybe he is still there.

I haven’t seen him since. Filming on the fifth season of Route Awakening did not take me to Xi’an. An invitation for a speaking gig in Japan lured me away in the autumn when I would have otherwise dropped by. And then there was a pandemic, and one thing led to another…. My six-year visiting professorship officially lapsed, since it is the sort of thing that is renewed in person at a conference banquet. The postgraduate faculty has moved twenty miles west, so not even the buildings are the same. And the people I knew have gone.

For five years, Xi’an was a huge feature of my life. The overnight plane became as commonplace as a bus. I got to see several intakes of students come and go — for many of them, my family being the first foreigners they had met. But the five years since means almost everybody has gone — the newly arrived bachelor’s students who sat in the front row of my lecture, would have graduated two years ago. If I turned up on their doorstep tomorrow, maybe only a couple of postgrads would even know who I was, and even then only vaguely. All those many dinners and outings and lectures and encounters are all lost, like tears in rain. Three different professors at that December 2017 banquet suggested I might like to be a visiting lecturer at their universities, too, but these things take time, and application, and will, and more than anything else, legwork. It took years to build the trust of the faculty at Xi’an, to prove that promises to return were not empty platitudes. Qiao Zhilin and I still wave at each other occasionally on social media, and tell each other that someday soon normality will be restored, but we can never really go back.

My son, who grew up surrounded by an adoring cloud of Chinese girls, has pre-teen schooling obligations that mean he can’t just wander away to China for three months anymore. His mother, who was the reason we went to Xi’an in the first place, is not my wife any more, and she is also struggling with the logistics of returning to a place that is no longer the same place, with people who are no longer the same people, and is now lacking a free spousal interpreter.

As of this week, I have been gone for as long as I was there. The last time I was in Xi’an, the deputy mayor offered to make me an honorary citizen of the city. The next time I go, I expect I will just be another tourist.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China and The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals.