We were supposed to be in Kunming for lunch time, but a rockslide in the mountains caused us to take a four-hour detour, and we didn’t reach our hotel until 20:00. So, no chance for my plans to see the Flying Tigers Museum in town. Our final stop on the road trip was a ramshackle yellow hut, stuck behind a new shopping mall. Its paint was peeling and its plaster falling off, it was being used as a shed, but it is one of a handful of surviving French station-houses from a century ago.

My PTC (piece to camera) went as follows: “The French didn’t have a toehold in the Chinese hinterland, but they did have a colony in what is now Vietnam, and built this railroad from there to the capital of Yunnan, to exploit the local resources. This is one of only a handful of surviving station-houses, but it’s practically inaccessible, and largely forgotten.” I had three chances to say it, although one was blown by the arrival of a train. The director has two cuts to work with – hopefully the light is right on one of them, and there is no noise pollution.

I earn my money not by saying these words, but through the hundreds of little arguments I have with the director about the order the words come in. Each PTC is written on the spot, but I have to fight over tiny nuances of meaning, so that we don’t get into trouble with Standards & Practices for saying something unverifiable, or waste our footage by saying something on camera that turns out to be wrong.

So I’m there saying we have to say “Chinese hinterland”, because the French did have a toehold in Fujian and Shanghai. We have to say “what is now Vietnam” because Vietnam did not exist as a political entity at the time, and if we say Indochine, some viewers won’t know what that is. We have to say “capital of Yunnan” because nobody has heard of Kunming, but we will have already explained where Yunnan is in the episode. We have to say “the local resources” because we can’t remember what they are, except for tin, and we know there was more than tin. We say a “handful” because we only have one source that names them as three stations, and S&P insist on two sources or we can’t state any facts at all.

And we say “largely forgotten” because the Chinese will moan if we tell the truth, which is that they have left it entirely derelict because the achievements of the colonial era mean nothing to them, even as they reinvent the wheel, with a new railway line running parallel to the one that has already been there for a hundred years. Maybe I earn my money after all, because I had less than five minutes to thrash all of the above out, and less than five more to get it on camera before we were back in the bus.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S02E01 (2016).

We are now in Xizhou, near Dali, in an area that is largely Bai, and which has somehow embraced heritage in a way entirely unlike the rest of China – I have not seen a skyscraper for two days. Closer to the coast, “heritage” seems to mean that everywhere gets a shopping mall and a car park, and a bunch of hawkers selling plastic machine-guns. But out here, it means that the old architecture is retained, with acre upon acre of quaint pointy-gabled houses, temples and taverns.

Green foothills loom above us on all sides – they will eventually merge into the Himalayas. This is the locus of the old Tea-Horse Route, a lesser-known trade network that sent tea into Tibet to buy ponies for the Chinese market. Salt, tea and trinkets would cross over the mountains into Burma, often carried by porters lugging their own weight or more, singing a song that went:

Six steps up and rest

Seven steps down and rest

Eleven steps flat and rest

You’re stupid if you don’t rest.

I’ve heard that someone would bang a gong at the end of each verse, signalling the next brief stop. Two hours’ drive into the mountains bring us to Shaxi, once the centre of the Tea-Horse network, now a slightly-touristed heritage town, selling wood carvings and Yunnan coffee. The place is plainly on the backpacker trail, and boasts an untold number of boutique cafes, tea houses and restaurants. Lunch is dry-fried beef in crisped mint leaves, Yunnan ham in tofu and goji berries, and tasteless mushroom fronds harvested with a sickle from the nearby canal.

My job is to walk around town reiterating what I’ve just told you, until two Bai dressed like Marlboro Men trot past on ponies. A price is swiftly agreed, and I am hoisted up onto Zhitu (Red Rabbit), an uncomplaining little horse supposedly descended from the pack animals of the old trading routes, so that I can continue my explanation while riding along. I look ridiculous, like a gorilla perched on a sausage dog. I am taught how to say whoah in Bai, which turns out to be waah, something I would probably end up saying anyway if Red Rabbit were to bolt. But we walk through three iterations – a wide-shot, a close-up and a safety, and he doesn’t throw me, and I clamber down and tell him he is a good little horse before I kiss him goodbye.

“Why did you do that!?” asks the aghast director.

“I’m British,” I explain. “We only show affection to dogs and horses.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S02E01 (2016).

We drive an hour or so through the Xinjiang countryside and the vineyards of the Turfan Depression, to the Loulan Winery, which is not actually in Loulan at all, but has purloined its name. A private Chinese enterprise, it started up in the immediate years after the Deng Xiaoping economic reforms, transplanting French and Italian vines to Turfan soil. The chef de domaine is French: Grégory Michel, a man from Provence who could not possibly have wanted to live here, except for the handy fact that he is married to a Chinese woman and hence regards it as something of a cushy posting.

Grégory shows us around the huge factory, with giant steel vats towering thirty feet above us. We all wear little white coats, mine looking particularly petit since it is designed for a little girl, or so it seems. It’s a far cry from Ismayil’s hand-cranked meat grinder, repurposed to mash grapes. Grégory’s industrial-size, conveyor-belt macerator is big enough to throw a whole person into.

The Loulan Winery is clearly pushing for the luxury tourist market. We wander faux caves decorated with Buddhist art, and sit in an elegant VIP room, with posh chairs of knotted rope, and a giant slab of a Viking table.

Grégory plainly has no idea that a convoy of Buicks is about to descend on his factory, but brightens with each passing moment when he realises that we are the advance party for an entire posse of journalists, who are shadowing our travels in a long crocodile of cars. “I shall get zem drunque!” he promises me, as we wander the pipes and vats.

We do the interview to camera in French, which ought to help the programme look suitably cosmopolitan, and puts a smile on Grégory’s face, which is very difficult with a Frenchman.

The advance car of the convoy turns up at lunchtime, and we snatch the chance to get some shots of me driving it past some vineyards. Meanwhile, the usual too-many-cooks cacophony of the publicity team is at full throttle. Even though they approved my speech outline two days earlier, they have now decided that they wish that my speech was 20 minutes longer. Luckily for them, I am precisely the sort of guy who can write an extra page about Wine on the Silk Road in sixty minutes.

I do my speech about the stories associated with wine on the Silk Road, including the arrival of grapes in the Han dynasty, the sozzled poetry of Li Bai in the Tang, the Mongols drinking themselves to death, and so on. It fills the time nicely and gets several laughs. Grégory then takes to the stage while his minions pour samples for the crowd, and within another 20 minutes, everybody is thoroughly munted on Chinese wine.

The Loulan Cabernet Sauvignon is very nice. This being China, I have never actually been able to have it chilled before, and it is perfectly drinkable. Grégory has plainly done a good job on quality control, although it remains to be seen if he can turn a profit. He says that the cost of making a bottle of wine in China is roughly the same as making one in France, but the local market won’t bear high prices, and the country is so big that simply putting a bottle in every off-licence costs 1000 times as much. Most of the price label of a bottle of Loulan wine is taken up with marketing.

We are invited to dinner, but need to be in Urumqi for the evening, so we hitch a lift with our local fixer, Ali. Halfway to Turfan, the producer calls for a toilet break (we have long since learned not to ask for any more details), and I lurk outside the bogs with Ali, while he sucks on a cheroot that smells like someone has set fire to an old sofa.

“I realised yesterday,” says Ali, “how difficult your job is. You really have only a few seconds to get it right, and there are people on their phones, and shouting at the crew, and there are radios in the background, and people knocking on the door, and the sun moves – you actually become aware of the fact that the sun is moving and there are clouds in the sky… it’s very hard.”

He doesn’t know that he makes it worse by subjecting me to the Gipsy Kings for a two-hour drive through the desert, but I suppose it is his car.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events appeared in Route Awakening S02E02 (2016).