‘There was an attack on Jin Yong’s writing in the Party newspaper, Zhongguo Qingnian Bao, by someone called Wang Shuo, which was a real hatchet job against his popularity with the young. Wang specifically called out Demi-gods and Semi-Devils for criticism, and said that it was unconscionably awful.

‘He only read the first volume, which is to say, the events that we see in this Battle Wizard movie, and said that he had to finish it “while holding his nose” accusing Jin Yong of “making every single error that someone can make in writing fiction” including shunting his characters around through predictable obstacles like “pigs driven through a narrow alley.”

‘So as you can perhaps already tell, it was a significant hatchet job, and went on and on about how Jin Yong’s books were so terrible, and so popular, that as far as Wang could see there was only one possible explanation, which was that people needed escapism from their modern lives, and that wuxia fiction served as, what he called, a “head massage.”

‘Unfortunately, Wang Shuo seemed to have forgotten the golden rule of literary criticism, which is not to pick a fight with someone who writes for a living, because only a few weeks later, Jin Yong published an absolutely rip-roaring response of his own in the Wenhui Bao newspaper in Shanghai.

‘He said that he was always pleased to read criticism of his work, and that he basically agreed that his fiction was over-rated, and he was sorry for all the awards it had won, and all the copies that it sold, and the millions of people who loved reading it. And, you know, it was probably a sign of terrible times that these books that Wang Shuo hated so much were the subject of a graduate course at Beijing University, and it was surely of great embarassment that American academics had staged a whole conference on his fiction in Colorado.

‘And he went on to say that it was kind of weird that Wang Shuo said he could barely finish the first of seven volumes, because the story actually only had five volumes, so it sounded to him that he was reading an illegal pirate edition, or maybe even a completely different book. But whatever, he was very grateful for millions of enthusiastic readers, and one troll whining about it didn’t bother him much.’

From my commentary track to Battle Wizard, to be found in Arrow Films’ new Shawscope #4 box set.

Singapore once grew riches from gambier, nutmeg and rubber – yet today, not a trace remains. Lost Plantations reveals a Singapore few remember – when gambier, nutmeg and rubber covered the land, and fortunes rose on the backs of bold planters and backbreaking labour.

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I make a couple of sneaky audio cameos in this new documentary from Sitting In Pictures, my former employers on Route Awakening.

Mr Yuan is the baffled taxi driver I have commissioned to take me to the Shaolin Temple, who cannot believe his luck. Today he will make a whole £30 for driving me there and back from my hotel in Luoyang, although it’s a nail-biting journey for 90 minutes through awful smog, with only twenty feet of visibility. Giant coal trucks, overloaded to double their capacity, loom out of the gloom, along with buses, vans and tuk-tuks little better than tractors. All the vehicles have their hazard lights blinking, and it soon becomes clear that every time we overtake someone, we are on a winding mountain path with little between us and the plummet back into town. It doesn’t feel like we are heading up a mountain, although before long there are patches of snow on the ground.

The Shaolin Temple itself is a little above the smog, living in a time warp where it is still the Ming dynasty and where the sky is still blue. Founded in the late 5th century AD by an Indian monk, it has been burned to the ground several times, but always risen from the ashes. Its location was chosen because it is circled by other mountains, which appear to the credulous eye to form a silhouette of a reclining Buddha. Thanks to the fame of Shaolin kung fu, and also of Zen Buddhism, which began here with the monk Bodhidharma, it has a lot of money to spend, and is a massive hilltop complex, attended by kung fu high schools, as well as halls of residence for the 200 remaining monks, and temples and pagodas in memory of great Shaolin achievements.

It is here that Bodhidharma meditated so long in a cave that his shadow literally burned into the wall, and here that his would-be pupil Huike stood stoically outside the cave, waiting to be invited to study.

Bodhidharma had no interest in teaching him, even when he found Huike standing up to his knees in snow.

 “I will teach you when it snows red,” he scoffed, only for Huike to pull out a knife and slash his own arm*, spraying the snow with his blood. It is here that the Buddhist phrase, “Standing in snow, the heart is revealed” comes from, which I think ought to be the motto of the Finnish Shorinji Kempo Association. (*English-language documentation says slashes his own arm OFF, one of many places where Shaolin myths get a bit weird).

My guide is Lisa Lau (although her business card says Lili Liu), and in keeping with the colour theme of the Shaolin temple, her puffa jacket is a holy orange. Her services are a hefty £30, for which she confesses she usually waits around all week for a single commission. The rest of the time, she works in marketing for the temple.

She talks about of the early life of Tang Taizong, first husband of Empress Wu, who was rescued from captivity as a young man by thirteen Shaolin monks, leading to the long-term association of the monastery with the Tang dynasty’s ruling family. We see a pagoda dedicated to Empress Wu’s mum, and many steles carved with details of Tang history and/or famous donations to the monastery. One is carved with the words So Doshin.

 “Oh yes,” says Lisa, “that one’s from Japan.”

We walk on the lucky carved lotuses to the central hall, and see the training ground where the monks have stamped 48 bowl-shaped depressions in the cobbles from constant training, and the “Bachelor Tree” where monks practicing the Two Fingers of Death have poked holes into its bark. I drop in at the Forest of Pagodas, where the remains of dead monks are enshrined in multi-stepped columns, and then head off for the show.

Yes, there’s a show. Monks punching holes in things and each other, slapping around sticks and swords, and bending their legs around their head. Although the monks were very good at what they did, a lot of what they did was conjuring and sleight of hand, and didn’t have a whole lot to do with Shaolin. Nor, to be honest, did five minutes of time-wasting comedy business when audience members were brought up on stage and asked to go through several punchy kicking movements for the entertainment of everyone else.

On the way back, the smog has lifted a little. We rumble slowly through squalid hamlets of shacks and barns, piles of coal and stacks of rags. People in the street are selling mud-caked leeks and oranges. A sleek limousine coming down the mountain ploughs into a three-wheeled pick-up truck and sprays sparks across the road.

“Ooh-hoo!” breathes Mr Yuan, as he swerves around the accident. It is all he says for the whole trip.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Martial Arts, and the narrator of the commentary track on Arrow Films’ Martial Arts of Shaolin. Photographs by Kati Clements.

Over at Iain Dale’s podcast of ghastly people, I am interviewed about Chairman Mao, who remains, of course, the Sun in Our Hearts.

In the 1950s, a fire ripped through the illegal Hakka communities clustered in the hills near Cheung Sha Wan (Long Sands Bay) north of Kowloon. Scrambling to house the displaced locals, the Hong Kong government authorized a rapid resettlement scheme to create massive housing estates in the area. These were austerely functional buildings – shared toilet facilities, and kitchen ranges on the balconies to keep the fires out of the interiors. The local children were schooled on the rooftop. These estates are largely gone now, but in the meantime, they have created their own contribution to Hong Kong history.

In one area, the “houses of Li and Zheng” (lei cheng uk), builders uncovered a brick tomb as they were laying the foundations. It turned out to be an unprecedented archaeological discovery – a tomb from the end of the Han dynasty, with its grave goods unplundered. The bricks on the wall bore the words GREAT FORTUNE TO PANYU, suggesting that they had been made either in what is now Guangzhou, or by craftsmen dispatched to the area to work on the project. The discovery locked Hong Kong into the orbit of China 1800 years before the present, even though there was perilously little inside the tomb.

Mainly, it contained pottery, and a tiny handful of bronze artefacts. There was no actual body in the tomb – possibly its intended occupant was never even interred there. “There were crowds all around,” comments Michael, one of the archaeologists in the on-site documentary. “Every time we brought something out of the dig, they would all cheer. I think they were having a lot more fun than we were.”

I am the sole visitor on a muggy Monday morning, to the modest little museum that now sits in the shadow of towering skyscrapers. The tomb, ironically, has outlived the emergency housing estate that led to its discovery, and is now an oddity in the middle of an all-new urban development. There is not even a Long Sands Bay any more – when the Lei Cheng Uk tomb was first built, it was on a hilltop by the sea; today, it is a mile inland, largely because of twentieth-century land reclamation projects. Long Sands Bay gives its name to the local metro station, but there is no sea in sight.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.