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.

We are off to Lijiang, home of the Naxi people, regarded in China as the cherries on the cake of nutcases, a quasi-Tibetan tribe famous for believing that they are descended from the survivors of the war with the snake people from space. Their God of Pestilence is depicted holding a steaming, fresh turd in his hand, and their shamans like to dip their hands in oil and set light to them so they can run around indoors throwing fire at people. They have the world’s only living pictographic language that causes all their sacred texts (and they have 20,000 sacred texts) to read like comic books, and their panoply of ceremonial artefacts includes “sacrificial puppets”. Their God of Banging is called Dsu, and the Ho-bpo ceremony involves praise to the Lord of Spunk. 150 years ago, they were still cannibals, although supposedly they have stopped doing it now. I am not making this up.

I try to interest the crew in my study of Naxi pictograms, but they display little interest in the symbols for “wizard” and “vaginal discharge.”

I am having trouble catching my breath today. It is after lunchtime before the director reveals that we are more than a mile above sea level, in the foothills of the Himalayas. So it is not my imagination; the air is thinner. Lijiang is nestled inside a curve of the “Golden Sands” river – it is 25 miles to the east, and also 25 miles to the west, and eventually it changes its name to the Yangtze. But here we are high, high up. Shangri-la, or rather, the town that purports to be Shangri-la, is only a few miles north of here. Peter Goullart, who was the local consul here in the 1940s, wrote in his autobiographical Forgotten Kingdom that matters get worse another mile up, where the thinner air makes it difficult to get a good night’s sleep, leaving all the Tibetans and related tribespeople permanently irritable.

The history of Lijiang is difficult to reconstruct, but a few historians have read between the lines of the Dongba recitations and the chronicles of the locals, and come up with the following. The Naxi themselves were once nomads on the desolate northern plains – this we can deduce from references in their most ancient funeral rituals to yurts and herds. This area was not even considered part of China until the Mongols conquered it. When Khubilai Khan’s troops arrived, a family of Naxi chieftains in Lijiang swiftly saw which way the wind was blowing, and willingly collaborated. They were instrumental in the Mongol conquest of the area, and maintained a constant war footing thereafter. Long after the Mongols packed up and went home, the Mu clan were sending raiding parties into the mountains and valleys, demanding tribute from the locals and proclaiming themselves as the rulers of everywhere from here to Tibet.

The Chinese hated Yunnan. The air was too rarefied, and the locals too odd, and they very happily left the Mu clan to it. The Mu chieftains, soon rebranded as princes, were sure to send some appropriate gifts to the coronation of each new emperor, and were thanked in turn by the conferral of official titles. When the Mongols retreated before the resurgent Ming dynasty, the Mu chieftains clung onto their power, for the same reason, which was that the Chinese really couldn’t stand the idea of such a desolate place, and were happy to leave the locals to it.

The Mu did not die; they faded away. In the 18th century, the Chinese reverted the Mu’s status as hereditary leaders, and instead incorporated them into the magistrate system of appointed governors. A few generations later in 1729, when the time came to appoint the next representative, Beijing surprised everybody by not appointing a Mu man at all. The princes had been dethroned, although apparently overnight, their demise had been coming for decades. Early in the 20th century, the consul Peter Goullart reported a banquet in Lijiang where the head of the Mu family was not even afforded a place at the high table. Instead, this shrunken, opium-addled old man was left to eat with the B-list. Now there is little to remind us of the Mu, apart from the stone bridge in Lijiang old town that was supposedly built at their behest, and a couple of mansions and monasteries endowed with what had once been their wealth.

Every conquest of territory downhill pushes other people further into the heights. The Kam once lived in the lowlands, but were shunted into the hills by the Mu conquest – the word for Kam in Chinese is Dong, and originally meant Good for Nothing, or perhaps The Hidden – the former definition has been deviously removed from modern dictionaries. Their famous songs sidle shame-facedly around the fact that they cannot read – a fact which we regularly encountered when filming there, when some of our interviewees were unable to write their own names on their release forms.

But as the Naxi pushed the Kam, the Kam pushed the Miao, who were driven even further into the heights, often living without fire or fresh water. But if the Miao were shunted, they also displaced someone. At the scrag end of history are the Yi, a people who even today have a fearsome reputation.

And then there are the amazonian Hlihin, reported in the diaries of Peter Goullart from the 1940s, when their brash, tough womenfolk would swagger into town with a couple of their husbands meekly in tow, on the search for new bridegrooms. Goullart treated several of them in his clinic, and reported that they were invariably suffering from advanced syphilis. We’re not going to visit them, either – in fact, I have seen no mention of the Hlihin in modern accounts, and wonder if they even exist anymore.

When the Red Army came through Lijiang on the Long March, the locals asked them who the emperor was these days. They had literally had no news from the outside world for fifty years.

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