The Luoyang Museum, an inverted ziggurat at the edge of town, deliberately designed to evoke the shape of a ding – the ancient sacred tripods that once marked the capital of the ancient kings. It’s packed with relics, but also with surprisingly cool oil paintings of key moments from ancient Chinese history, painted by a local artist with a real eye for both historical accuracy and alluring, pulp-fiction moments of iconic action. Others might scoff, but I found them to be very helpful in illustrating interesting moments like the coming of the Xiongnu nomads to Luoyang, or the fall of the Shang dynasty, or Empress Wu on tour, which are otherwise conveyed through wandering long halls of pots in cabinets.

Luoyang tourist literature makes a big deal about how it was the capital of “thirteen dynasties”, but that is rather economical with the truth. A lot of the time it was merely one of the capitals of those dynasties, like the Tang, that were obliged to shuttle up and down the Yellow River in order to allow the trees to grow back elsewhere – Xi’an had to be periodically evacuated when it became too difficult to get lumber nearby for building and fuel. Some of the other dynasties for which Luoyang was a capital were relatively minor ones that only laid claim to parts of China during periods of unrest. Still others were historical dead-ends, like the ten years that Wu ruled from Luoyang in her self-proclaimed “Zhou” dynasty. That’s not to say that those dynasties weren’t fascinating in their own right – most of you know all about Wu, but the Northern Wei, whose scandals make Game of Thrones look like the Tellytubbies, were also based here.

But they aren’t the big-picture dynasties like the Song or the Ming or the Qing. Empress Wu’s Luoyang wasn’t actually finished in the Tang dynasty. The Western part of the planned city was never built, the encircling wall never completed, as everything went into decline before they could get there. Regardless, you can’t dig a hole in Luoyang without finding some ancient junk. Two miles from our hotel, workmen digging the foundations for a new shopping mall have just hit into a tomb from the Eastern Han dynasty, and the 24-hour metro construction keeps running into temples and palaces from times gone by.

Today I am interviewing Gao Xisheng, the curator, about the arrival of the Sogdians (the Greek-influenced Persians on the very western edge of China), who were the middle men of the Silk Road, and responsible for a lot of the cultural and culinary imports of the cosmopolitan Tang era. My job here is to keep him talking, and to keep his eyes on me, not on the camera; to interject at regular intervals with signals that I understand, which usually take the form of extra questions about fire-worshipping customs.

Mr Gao is very keen on metadata, pointing out that the Sogdian tombs in Xi’an and Luoyang suddenly arrive around the 7th century, as if out of nowhere, thereby demonstrating that as one might expect, Tang China suddenly became the sort of place that could end up with a community of immigrants that stayed around long enough to start dying there. He has similar things to say about the sancai pottery, noting that it was a tiny flash in the historical pan, and is only really found in the Xi’an-Luoyang area, and only in the Tang dynasty. New commodities from along the Silk Road, particularly cobalt from Afghanistan, transformed Chinese pottery with far more interesting blues in the late Middle Ages, causing everybody to give up on crappy brown-spinach-cream combinations.

He also points out to me a pattern of turquoise pebbles, once inlaid into a staff or similar symbol of power, now with the wood rotted away, delineating a sinuous pattern in the ground like an elephant’s trunk, topped by an abstract square head. “I mean,” he says, “it might be an elephant’s trunk, but we think it’s probably something much cooler – China’s first dragon.” It’s 3,000 years old, so those are probably fighting words in Anyang, where we are going next week.

I have developed a sixth sense with interviewees. I can tell the moment I look at them if they are going to be a garbage fire or a fun time, and it’s never about what they know. It’s more about the degree to which they are prepared to say what they don’t know, and thereby allow us to discard pointless questions and spare them the nerves generated by lying and bullshitting on camera. Mr Gao was chatty charm on a stick with me, to the extent that when he showed me an entirely mundane-looking, modern looking mug and told me it was 3,000 years old, I was able to tell him he was trying to fool me, and get a laugh instead of a slap.

“I know,” he says. “It looks like something you might find in Starbucks. But people get fixated on all the weird-shaped ceremonial vessels used by the ancient aristocracy. The common people drank out of mugs. Just like us.”

It’s more of the same after lunch with Li Ying, who proves to be a coquettish and chatty historian when engaged about her subject. I get her to talk me through beauty tips for Tang women (always paint red stripes on your face… try to be as fat as possible) as well as elaborate Tang hairstyles like the Parrot, the Cocoon (a swept-up bun modelled on a silk-worm’s) and the Knife. There’s only one that she can’t give me the etymology for, which is the Treasures – a sort of forward-drooping rolled top knot, flanked by two lateral buns.

“The thing is,” I whisper to the director afterwards, “I think it’s a reference to the Three Treasures, pickled and retained by eunuchs to keep themselves whole in the afterlife. In other words, the Treasures hairstyle is a giant stylised cock and balls, resting on a lady’s head.

But it’s all fascinating stuff, not the least because the Luoyang Museum has dated the development of hairstyles, which means to a certain extent, they can roughly gauge the era of tomb decorations simply by the hairstyles on display. There’s even some fun to be had about the Hufu (literally Barbarian Garb) tomboys of Wu’s era, who would exude cool by wearing narrow-sleeved jackets with lapels and trousers.

I won’t lie, it was a gruelling day. It’s taken a while for my Chinese to grind back into action, and I made the rookie error of not sitting down whenever the opportunity arose, thereby ending up on my feet practically all day. The museum was a riot of phones going off, and shouty visitors, nosey passers-by and cacophonous audio-visual displays. A new Chinese habit, of loudly playing phone games or faffing with the internet while having a dump, has turned any nearby toilet into an echo chamber of shitty pop music and beepy bang-bang noises, accompanied by the occasional cough and plopping sound. But I have been earning my money today in subtle ways, such as the moment when the director made me stand beside a statue of a man with a beard, and told me to come up with a 30-second piece to camera about the historical relevance of the Sogdians. I can do that. It’s what I do.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events formed part of Route Awakening S05E01 (2019).

I must be getting good at this. Driving back to the Wastes of Yin, I know more about the site than the crew, because I already shot here once before. So I can direct the car and the van to the right institute, and point out Dr He, because I’ve met him before, and I can tell them that the meeting room is not the ideal place, because there is a warehouse upstairs full of relics that is more photogenic. I can also point out that if they want to get the lens really close to an oracle bone, Dr He has a bunch in a box that he will literally hold up to the camera.

Dr He remembers me from the Chinese chariot shoot a couple of years ago, and so he is immediately at ease and merry. When it comes to the interview, in front of boxes marked HUMAN TEETH, DOG BONES, HUMAN BONES, COW HORNS etc., we rattle through in a single long take. I quiz Dr He about the problems of reassembling oracle bones, and the fun he had tunnelling through a Sui dynasty tomb and a Han dynasty tomb in order to get to the Shang stuff two metres down. He tells me that the size of the turtle plastrons used in divination usually suggest that they came from the river, but some of them were so big that they were liable to be sea turtles, thereby suggesting that the Shang dynasty had trade links as far away as Malaysia.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there was some Malaysian Marco Polo who travelled all the way to Anyang. These things might have taken decades to drift from village to village until they ended up in the Shang capital. Dr He rattles on non-stop for 45 minutes, which delivers us 90 minutes of footage on two cameras. Time for the pick-ups and then we are out, as if we knew what we were doing.

Turtles are important, says Dr He, because they lived so long, but also as Sarah Allan has argued in The Shape of the Turtle, because they may have signified the shape of the cosmos to the ancient Chinese – a north, south, east and west around a central plain, and in the sky, a big dome overhead.

The Shang people were a bloodthirsty bunch. The Shang dynasty is the most popular topic among Chinese heavy metal groups, because after you hear about all the incest, human sacrifice and torture of the Shang kings, biting the head off a bat looks a bit everyday and soft. The on-site museum has trouble skirting around the fact that their royal graves are full of dead children, chucked in to keep them company in the afterlife, along with dismembered dogs and the usual dead horses, and a special ceremonial axe used for beheading enemies. I’ve read the oracle bones, so I know already about the boiled heads, burned slave-girls and other atrocities littering their tombs.

We finish up in the tomb of Lady Fuhao, the female general who led the armies of the late Shang, wife, or possibly sister, or possibly both to the king Wuding, who entirely by chance turns out to be the guy we know most about because Anyang was the site of oracle bone pits dating from his era. Fuhao’s tomb was miraculously undisturbed; she was buried not only with her signature C-shaped dragon rings and a gaggle of dead slaves, but a collection of bronzes that were already quite ancient when they went into the ground. Some of Fuhao’s bronzes were specifically cast as grave goods (we know this, because they included her posthumous title), but others were seemingly part of what today we would have to call her antique collection.

I felt today that I was really earning my money, and that the crew were really on top form snatching footage, sometimes, when the drone was up, with three cameras running at the same time. What with all the shooting on 4K resolution, as future-proofing against TV channels that might insist on higher quality film in future, we are generating two or three terabytes of data every week. Michelle the assistant producer has to stay up each night uploading it to a server in Hong Kong so the editors can get to work.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening, SO5E02.

The National Museum of Chinese Writing looks like a newly landed alien spaceship, decked out with golden animal totems shining in the sun, and supported by striking red columns, the fabled taotie mythical beast that shows up on so many Shang-era cauldrons. The museum is in Anyang, of course, because Anyang was where archaeologists uncovered vast pits of broken turtle shells, inscribed with questions to the gods for the Shang dynasty rulers – a peek inside their archaic Google history, if you like.

It’s also closed today, so we technically have the place to ourselves, although a bunch of surly cleaners and key-jangling security guards seem keen to ruin any quiet moments that we might have. The director films me walking among the oracle bones, and I manage a couple of relatively long pieces to camera about the story of the discovery of the Wastes of Yin, and how Chinese history got 600 years added to itself practically overnight in 1928 after the discoveries in Anyang proved that the ancient stories were actual history and not a myth.

Ms Han is a happy lady who seems very animated and passionate about oracle bones, and subjects us to a 45-minute salvo of words about the meaning of the 150 most easily identifiable characters. She doesn’t seem to have been interviewed on camera before, and is fretful about “saying the right thing.” We have to explain to her what an interview is, which is to say that I will ask her questions, which she will answer. She seems to think that we will want her to give a one-hour lecture to the camera about her work. No, we insist, I will just ask her about stuff.

On several occasions, Clarissa the fixer has to practically walk her through the answer that we expect before she will deliver it, even though she just delivered it, word-perfect, off camera. Like a lot of Chinese academic interviewees, she has trouble understanding that we are supposed to be having a conversation, and it becomes easier to just mike her up, not tell her the camera is running, and let her talk away without the chance to get nervous. By the end, the director just wants us to walk through the museum gallery talking, but we keep stopping at displays to talk about the origin of the various characters, and the director shouts at us to keep bloody walking instead of finding out about things.

“Jonathan, stop being interested!” she yells from the other end of the gallery.

But I think Ms Han is enjoying herself. After previously saying that she could only fit us in on Monday afternoon, she has suddenly freed up all of tomorrow morning to invite us over to her college to sit in on a class, so I think she is starting to feel like a bit of a celebrity.

Ms Han’s faculty at Anyang Normal University is built around another museum of Chinese writing, which is far more immersive and engaging than yesterday’s. It’s got all sorts of fun art installations, including a four-wall display of animated characters that can be filmed playing across my face and surrounding me like a veritable sea of words. There are even life-sized statues based on ancient Chinese writing, such as the stick figure holding two oxtails that was the origin of the Chinese word for “dance”.

The Sea of Words, for those not part of the Chinese community, is the name of a famous dictionary of Chinese characters. I have a copy that used to belong to “Uncle” Don Rimmington of the Leeds University Department of East Asian Studies, although I am not sure he knows it ended up with me.

The university also have a little area where students can carve their own oracle bones, leading me to have a nice half-hour with a guy called Zhang, who patiently talks me through the process. He is very excited to see that I am deliberately getting things wrong so that he can correct the way I hold my chisel and the way I hold the bone. Unlike his teacher, Ms Han, he comes to realise that I am doing it to make him look smarter, and not that I am just irredeemably stupid.

Ms Han talks me through the simplest of characters from the Shang dynasty, the most basic 150 of which are simply pictograms.

“The Shang people tried to tag the simple points of difference between similar objects,” she explains. “So what is it that makes a cow different..?”

This is a difficult question to answer in Chinese when I don’t know the word for udders.

“The… nipples?” I suggest.

“No, you stupid boy. Everything has nipples. Cows have horns and a long face. Not like the goat, which has different horns, but still has nipples.”

All right, then. And the horse has a mane and a tail, and a tiger has a stripe. I get her giggling about some of my weirder guesses, and she gets so excited that she starts shouting “NO!” in English every time I get something wrong.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening, S05E02.