We have a van that could seat twelve, but the rear four sets are folded up for all the gear. There are nine of us today. Two drivers (one with a loaner Buick for the beauty shots), the director, the cameraman, the sound-and-drone guy, the grip, the girl with a clipboard and the fixer. Oh, and me – nearly forgot. I am the “talent”, and my talent is having to say precisely the right words, in precisely the right order, in the sole 20-second window I am liable to get in the midst of a quarter-hour’s faffery. This is harder than it sounds, because it is 77 degrees in the shade, I have to wear oddly warm clothes to fit the continuity, our very presence draws crowds of people who are both noisy and distracting, and everything I say has to be written on the fly, but also factually accurate, and verifiable by two sources – those sources not to include online editable wikis. Otherwise, anything I say can be questioned by National Geographic S&P (Standards and Practices) back in Washington, and the footage will be useless. There is no space for an umm or an err… I cannot get any proper nouns even slightly wrong. I can’t repeat any words in any given speech.

Out to the long road south of the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, so we can do some shots of the Buick driving around past Chinesey things. The car we are using in on loan from the Xi’an dealership, so we have a driver wearing my shirt just in case the clothes are visible through the window, driving through all the fiddly bits. All I have to do is drive in a straight line from one point to another on two occasions, so they can get footage of me at the wheel in a built-up area.

As the crew start to set up, the security guards assemble. First a passing lady with a red armband. Then two men with walkie talkies and red armbands. Then three men with pressure hoses, washing the nearby statues, also with armbands. One of them stands right in front of the camera, calmly and without rancour. He won’t get out of the way until he sees our pass. We don’t have one, and when the fixer rings through to the tourist office who is supposed to have given us one, they don’t know who she is. We waste nearly an hour while she faffs with them, while the red armband stands in our way. Eventually, she returns with a signed form, and he pretends to have forgotten that we are there, walking away talking to an imaginary interlocutor on his phone.

Up to the Great Wild Goose Pagoda itself for me to do a 20-second piece to camera about how it was built as a repository for Tripitaka’s Buddhist scrolls. This takes two hours, because the camera has to be set up, the sound checked, the area cleared, the script agreed upon, and then a bunch of arseholes with mopeds and plastic machine guns cleared out of the way. Our new-found filming liaison, a specky woman in a mauve blouse, frets that by walking from the south side of the tower to the north side, we have effectively walked out of her jurisdiction, and so might face more red armbands at any moment. Meanwhile, crowds of people assemble nearby, pointing their iPhones at us and trying to work out if I am someone famous.

Up to the Muslim Quarter for biang biang noodles for lunch. We luck into a relatively deserted Muslim restaurant where I can talk to camera about the history of this particular dish – international as it is, with American chilis and tomatoes, carrots and cumin from westwards on the silk road, noodles made from wheat, etc. The restaurant staff are also not camera-shy at all, and keen to let the cameraman film them at work. It is a national holiday, so outside it is utter chaos. But we get lots of footage in the can.

Then the Tang Western Market for me to talk about the origin of the Silk Road, and finishing up at the Forest of Lions on the campus of the Xi’an College of Fine Arts. Or is it the Arts University? Or is it the Xi’an University of the Arts? Got to get it right, and got to get it right before the light goes, and before that old lady behind me throws bread to the ducks, or we need to change a camera battery, or before someone’s car alarm goes off.

At the end of the day, I ask the director how much footage we have got of the 132 minutes we need. She thinks maybe 60 seconds. But it was our first day, the crowds were distracting, and we lost an hour to battery hunts and an hour to official interference. It could be worse, and tomorrow should be better. Although tomorrow may be a different story, because I will be in a town I have never been before, talking about puppets.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in season two of Route Awakening (2016).

On the wall in the Yuxi Bronze Museum is a giant set of bamboo strips, engraved with classical Chinese. This is where I earn my money.

“Aha,” I say to the camera, “here we’ve got the entire text of the chapter of the Grand Scribe’s Records about the ‘south-western barbarians’. It starts with a geographical description of the region, the names of the tribes (see, here’s the Dian), and the lay of the land, and then it goes into the story of their first contact with the Chinese. Here we get the emissaries turning up from the Han Emperor, and a fantastic question from the Dian king, when he asks the ambassadors: ‘Is this Han realm bigger than mine?’ He really had no idea who he was dealing with, but when he finally submitted to the Han emperor, here it is, he is bestowed with a ‘royal seal’.”

It’s a good morning in the bronze museum, where the staff stare open-mouthed in amazement as the foreign film crew completely ignores most of their exhibits, and concentrates on the stuff they consider boring – the bamboo strips carved with Chinese, and a naff-seeming diorama of life in Dian times. Except it’s not naff, I point out. Every single element of it has been drawn directly from the bronzes we have been examining. We have seen (and filmed) the original artefacts that informed the diorama’s hunting scene, its battle scene, and the scene of human sacrifice underway on a nearby hilltop.

Lunch is a fish hotpot cooked on hot stones, with Yunnan rice, which is like normal rice but comes with fried potatoes and bits of bacon. The director allows us fifteen minutes to descend like jackals on a nearby pottery shop, where I spend all the money I have earned this morning buying a new tea set, rice bowls and two cups decorated with the Heart Sutra. I think, between us, we manage to spend about £300, which makes the owner’s day, as she only opened ten minutes beforehand.

In the afternoon, we head out to a pokey village at the bottom of a mountain, where the locals inexplicably worship a mermaid goddess, whose pert baps seem to have been designed by a sculptor who has never seen a woman’s chest in real life. A cluster of pensioners, sunning themselves in the marketplace, soon drift over like zombies to see what the film crew is up to, but they are incredibly friendly, and our cameraman gets a lovely shot of me talking to three wizened old men about topless mermaids.

We are here to climb Lijiashan, the mountain where some eighty Dian kingdom graves were unearthed. It involves a wheezing ascent up endless steps, to a small guardhouse where we find Zhang Lineng, the watchman.

A huge part of my job, and something I am embracing with greater fervour as time goes by, lies in putting the interviewees at ease. Mr Zhang didn’t even know he was an interviewee before we showed up, and I am the first foreigner he has ever met. But I bound in and introduce myself, and get him chatting about his life.

Our fixer and Clicky the Propaganda Guy, who is still lurking around, protest that the man’s Chinese is unintelligible, and that we might need an interpreter. But he makes perfect sense to me, no more or less than anyone else. This has happened before, in Shandong, where Chinese people found locals difficult to understand, but I found them no harder to understand than anyone else. The local accent fiendishly replaces all H’s with F’s, and occasionally drifts towards Cantonese, but that’s it.

So he takes me around the pit where the Famous (not that famous) Cow Tiger Table was unearthed, and reminisces about how strange it was to the local villagers, like him, when their hilltop was suddenly deemed so important that the People’s Liberation Army sent an armed detachment to guard it.

Mr Zhang is a rare kind of interviewee, because he is a Michael Wood sort of choice – not an archaeologist or a historian, but a random man of the people who happens to work near the site. So while it’s not quite the usual National Geographic experience, it is oddly entertaining. He reminisces about how weird it was when he was a boy, and truckloads of archaeologists started turning up at the village at the bottom of the mountain, and how was there, literally standing at the side of Pit 69, when they unearthed a bronze cowrie shell container, decorated with dancing Central Asian shamans. He also reveals that the grave contained two bodies, a woman and a murdered slave girl, but that the coffin the archaeologists found was inexplicably thrown away.

I ask him about life as a security guard.

“It was tough in the early days. The thing that’s made the biggest difference is the phone. If there are robbers on the site, I can call for back-up. I can call the police. Or someone who sees something suspicious can just call me. Life is a lot easier now.”

I ask if things get creepy up on the mountain alone at night.

“Well, down in the village people say that sometimes they can hear fighting. Swords clashing together and people screaming in a language they don’t understand. There was one night when I heard a real commotion outside, but when I came out to look, nobody was there.”

Clicky the Propaganda Guy is gesticulating wildly, calling a time-out on something he really doesn’t want discussed on camera. Second-hand local myths are one thing, but a self-reported experience of the supernatural will not be allowed on television in China.

At which point, the director slaps me in the face.

She had seen a mosquito on my cheek, and took extreme action in a split-second, lest it suck my blood and leave a lump on my face sure to ruin the next week’s filming. Her palm lands with an impressively loud whack, and oblivious to the reason why, all Mr Zhang sees is a small Chinese woman beating up the presenter.

“Wow,” he says. “You have a tough job.”

Our pocket drone struggles like the Little Engine That Could against the high winds on the mountain top. There is just time to rush back to the Bronze Museum, which now has the sun on its façade, to shoot the opening shot of me entering. Except the museum has closed five minutes early and the staff have scarpered, so we have to cheat by placing the camera on the other side of the street, and having me walk across the road as if it is the path leading up to the door. But we have to wait first for a marching column of soldiers to pass by. They stare at me warily, until I give the Communist Party salute, at which point they all start giggling and saluting back.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E05 (2019).

Up at 0630 for the two-hour drive around the lake to the village where Yang Shaohua has his gallery and workshop. I blunder in late, thanks to having the wrong address, and find him holding court around a posh tea table, chuffing on a water pipe like a giant bronze bong.

Mr Yang is handsome and charming, knowledgeable and talented. I know that sounds like me buttering up some Party bigwig, but he knows the bronze-casting process so well that he can give a ten-minute speech in answer to a simple question about how it’s done. He knows everything from the chemical formulae to the metallurgy mix, and he doesn’t just cast the bronze, but carves the models and draws the original concept artwork. He is also a great host, faffing with his tea paraphernalia while the crew smokes fags in his gallery, so much so, that we seem to lose over an hour during the day to tea.

Mr Yang is responsible for a lot of the statues I have marvelled at in Chinese public spaces, including the giant golden phoenix in front of the Yunnan Provincial Museum. He tells me about the three-metre Mother of Dragons he made for a temple to the Baiyi people’s famous rain goddess, and his biggest-ever Buddha, a ten-metre effigy for a temple somewhere. At the moment, he is working on soldiers for the Songshan military memorial, although when he leads me into the modelling room, I am surprised to find four life-sized clay men standing to attention in puttees, pith helmets and Hitler moustaches.

“They are Japanese devils,” he explains. “They get a lot of Japanese tourists there, so I suppose it does no harm to give them something to take a selfie with.” The Japanese soldiers all have real shoelaces and stitching, because it’s easier to do that and let the wax mould take an impression from the real thing, than it is to painstakingly carve them.

Since he is an official Intangible National Treasure, the Propaganda Bureau are all over this one like a rash. A beaming woman in clacking heels keeps ruining the sound recording, while her minion with a clicky camera keeps wandering into the background of every shot.

“A cameraman,” mutters our director, “of all people, should know not to ruin someone else’s shot.” She is particularly annoyed because Propaganda are insisting on “entertaining” us at a lunch banquet, which gives us only an hour to shoot our interview before we are dragged off to a restaurant with eleven other people, and forced to make small talk with a bunch of local officials only there for the free boondoggle, who manage to piss me off from the get-go by asking me if I can use chopsticks.

Bearing in mind that I had walked into the room, introduced myself in Mandarin, and embarked upon a conversation about Bronze Age culture in south-west China, I think my “of course” was an object lesson in tact. The last thing I want is chili fish-head soup for lunch, and the last thing our director needs is an hour ripped out of her shooting schedule a mere hour after we started.

Mr Yang, in the meantime, is having a whale of a time talking to us about his work, which often involves reproductions of Dian Kingdom artefacts. The museum people, in fact, have so much trust in him that they have let him digitally scan all the Dian Kingdom finds, and he does a roaring trade in replicas of the Famous (not that famous) Cow and Tiger Table.

He warms to me right away when I correctly identify a taotie totem beast on a replica Shang cauldron, and immediately ask him if a stylised goat was made for Yuexiu park in Guangzhou. I am, in fact, able to tell him that I have seen several of his statues in various parts of China.

“Do you need a bronze bust of yourself?” he asks. “I can knock one up for £3,000.”

No, I say. Nobody is interested in seeing my bust.

It’s not the easiest of days, because shooting in a foundry next to a building site is a non-stop cacophony that plays havoc with the sound. Nor do we have footage of several parts of the process, including the all-important molten bronze bit – we are trusting Mr Yang to send us something shot with his phone. It doesn’t help that the gallery has three mangy guard dogs who have industriously shat everywhere. But Mr Yang shows me how to pour wax into the mould to make my very own Famous (not that famous) Cow and Tiger Table.

The wax is then wrapped in clay, and the clay mould thus formed is heated until the wax flows away, leaving space for the molten bronze.

“Of course,” he says, “back in the old times they used beeswax, but these days we use the industrial variety.”

The word for honey in Old Chinese is an Indo-European import, mjit (as in mead), implying that honey husbandry, like chariots, is something that came into China with foreign settlers sometime in the Bronze Age. And that means that the Bronze Age itself could also very likely have been something imposed on the Chinese by foreign invaders – mysterious elites like those Dian warriors.

“Oh, I’m not surprised,” says Clicky the Cameraman from Propaganda, as we sit around the tea table for yet another break. “I mean, there’s a whole foreign city under the water of the lake here. They found it when they were laying cables for the power plant, and the government banned anyone from investigating further.”

The underwater city in Fuxian Lake was supposedly carbon-dated to 250 BC, around the time of the Dian Kingdom, but our director refuses to believe it. She suspects that the whole thing was a hoax thought up by local students to promote tourism in the region. “Not really,” claims Clicky from Propaganda. “The reason there hasn’t been any news about it since 2007 is that we’ve put a blanket ban on talking about it.”

Mr Yang doesn’t want us to leave. He lures us back to the tea table for another cup, and then points out that because we have a two-hour drive home and it’s already six, we might as well stay in town for dinner.

“I know of a lovely place nearby that does traditional peasant food,” he promises. It’s only when we are standing outside that he proudly announces: “The specialties are fish-head soup and tripe.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E03 (2019).