Mr Bao has turned up in a long Mongol robe with a trilby perched incongruously on the top. He is here to talk about the intangible cultural heritage of Mongol epics, which he sings and talks through while playing a sihu.

The sihu is a fiddle-like instrument, like the erhu, with a soundbox at the base, a long shaft held perpendicularly, and four strings, played by a double-stringed bow so that two strings are sounding at any one time. Mr Bao’s performance includes a bunch of little tricks, adding vibrato by shaking the shaft rather than the strings, adding a drumbeat by clicking the edge of his bow on the soundbox while he fiddles, and flicking the strings to make them thrum. All the while he sings and yells through the story of Toqta-Temur, the last non-Muslim leader of the Golden Horde and the great-great-great grandson of Genghis Khan. Toqta spent a large part of his “reign” fighting off civil war with other Mongols and insurgencies by the peoples of Eastern Europe, which leaves plenty of time in his epic to talk about his attacks on the Russians his war with his cousin and former ally, Nogai, to whom he had once rashly given the Crimea.

Late in his reign, around 1304, he and his cousins accepted the authority of the grandson of Khubilai Khan, thereby restoring peace to the Mongol Empire that had, in fact, not been peaceful at all at any previous point. He declared war on Italian merchants in the Caucasus, and eventually married a weeping teenage bride, Maria Palaeologus, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. But none of us get much of the above, because Mr Bao is singing in Mongol.

Late in the day, we relocate to the Mandula music school, where a man called Mandula leads the Mandula band. It’s a proper hothouse for the musically gifted. Lessons start at half past seven each morning, with normal schooly-type stuff up to lunchtime. From one o’clock to half past eight each afternoon, the tuition is entirely musical. Mandula is something of a teddy boy, favouring a long purple coat and well-polished winkle-pickers, as well as an impressive mohican. He has something of the rock star about him, but has accreted an impressive array of students – a bunch of youths playing erhus and sihus, as well as a statuesque singing girl in a searingly white slinky dress and a Mongolian dildo hat, several drummers, a man who plays an instrument made from a string of sheep’s kneebones, and a gaggle of groupies. This last group seems to serve no actual purpose, but clutter up the practice hall, sneaking photographs of the camera crew on all occasions. I am sure that within a few weeks, framed pictures of the National Geographic crew will join those already on the wall of his students with various C-list celebrities, and/or clutching prizes for princely sums like £10.

We shoot them playing a 20-minute set that I wish I could have bought on CD, although sadly we will be unable to use the moment when Mandula got bored and decided to break into the Game of Thrones theme – music clearances.

I am really enjoying being with the Mongols. They are easy interviewees, talkative and friendly. One doesn’t feel that one is dealing with a hostile witness, but instead with someone who enjoys the attention and is keen to make a good impression. Mandula in particular, who has written a book of horse-head fiddle music and appeared several times on some sort of national show like China’s Got Talent, has got plenty to say for himself, and gamely tries to teach me how to do the droning Mongolian throat-singing called khöömi. It takes three months to learn, apparently, so there is not much hope of me getting it right in ten minutes, but there is plenty of fun footage of us growling at each other, bibbling our lips and impersonating goats.

Mandula then reveals that as well as leading a band of Mongols, he has attempted to integrate ancient and modern by combining khöömi with rapping. This seems too good to resist, and so the director asks him to give us a whirl. He throws his teddy boy coat behind him, where there is a minion poised ready to catch it, and launches into a beatboxing horror that sounds like a herd of goats falling down some stairs in an echo chamber.

The director gets us to finish by droning at each other: OOooooOOoooOOeeeh, OOowowooowowo, Errrrrrgle. I’ve had worse Wednesday nights.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E03), 2018.

Awake before dawn so that the three-hour drive back to Lijiang still puts us there before breakfast, all the better to get a day out of it. But nobody knows what day to have. We need something Naxi-related and preferably fertility related, and the best Mack can rustle up is an afternoon masterclass in pictograms with Mr He, our favourite wizard. So we do some driving shots around Baisha and select a restaurant to charm so that we can use their upstairs room as a jury-rigged studio. We end up in a place that has its own micro-brewery, with predictable results.

Somewhat merrier, we set up for the wizard, who has come to teach me some of the Naxi pictograms – the world’s only living hieroglyphic script. We start with some simple ones like house, man, and family, and soon progress to more complex ones like the various words for animal or a particular kind of sacred mountain. I ask him how the Naxi handle modern inventions, and he takes a new piece of paper to show me the words for aeroplane, television and computer.

Fine, I say, you can draw an aeroplane. But what about the wizard down the road?

Oh, says Mr He, there’s a dongba council that rules on the correct way to draw new words. So we all draw them that way.

We finish up with him writing a sentence in hieroglyphics and asking me to translate it. It contains seven characters, only two of which he has taught me, so I have to wing it. The seventh is “home” and the sixth is a man on two lines, which I guess means “walk”. The second is river and the fourth looks almost exactly like the Chinese character for rice paddy, while the fifth is a man who appears to be carrying a bag.

“Crossing the river,” I say, “I harvest crops and return home.”

Not crops, he says, “corn”, but he is plainly impressed. But this is how I have been reading Chinese for twenty years. It wouldn’t be the first time I had to deduce meaning from a sentence with only two reference points.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E04), 2018.

Hongyan, the village where we have spent this week, is three hours from Lijiang. We have driven a further three hours on the winding mountain roads, which have turned into single lane tracks, and peter out here, on a precipice, above a squat, concrete dam. Two Chinese men are waiting for us in a flatbed tractor, the only vehicle that can make it up the slope and along the muddy pathways for the next half an hour before we reach our destination – a remote hilltop farmhouse where Master Peacock makes knives.

This is the second Peacock we have had to deal with here, so I shall redub him John Craven in a Lenin Hat. John Craven in a Lenin Hat doesn’t just make knives, he makes the iconic fork-topped machetes that are an iconic symbol of Lisu manhood, and even show up on the Lisu crest.

He makes them out of truck suspension springs, which turn out to be good steel even when the truck is broken up. He breaks off a piece of roughly the right size, and hammers it in his forge until it is done, firing the flames with a bellows the size and shape of a coffin, operated by a giant pump handle. I briefly step in with his son to hammer on one side of the anvil, but John Craven in a Lenin Hat doesn’t speak Mandarin, so there are no interviews to be done – most of today’s shooting is B-roll of him at work, while I sit on a rock and wait for my next 20-second piece to camera.

For lunch, his wife lays out freshly made bread and a bowl piled with oozing honeycombs. The director tries to stage a dinner scene, but the Craven in a Lenin Hat family are all petrified of me, and the set-up ends up looking like Saddam Hussein trying to be chummy with hostages.

John Craven in a Lenin Hat’s two-foot knives are rather wonderful, and very cheap here at the source, seven hours from the nearest airport. I am tempted to buy one for myself, but it is now illegal to have knives in one’s luggage, even when checked in, thanks to the Islamist knife attacks at Kunming airport a while ago. Postage restrictions are unclear, and I am not going to blow my cash on a machete that I have to dump at the airport.

The director has strictly ruled that we must leave by 3pm. It will take half an hour to get back to the car, and another three hours to get back to the village, and this evening we have to be there to watch another of our interviewees climb the Ladder of Knives and throw himself into the Sea of Fire. This is the big finale of the local show, but he can’t be arsed to perform it if there are less than 20 people in the crowd, so we have had to bribe him with 500 kuai to perform it regardless. All of which means we don’t have the time to do pick up shots of John Craven’s chickens, nor to drone among the majestic mountains, tightly clad in green firs, that tower above the shadowy, narrow valley.

But John Craven won’t let us leave. His wife has made dinner and we have to eat it or he will lose face. They’ve killed a chicken and everything. So we glumly pick our way through gizzards and feet, the director sucking on the liver, until it is decreed that we have put on enough of a performance of eating to be allowed off the mountain-top.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E04), 2018.

Bored with the two-hour wait for everybody to get their stuff together for breakfast, the director storms off back towards our hostel, thereby stumbling across a bunch of peasants slaughtering a pig in a field. It is a wedding party, getting ready for a blowout tomorrow where 1000 guests will work their way through a quarter of a tonne of pork, 184 chicken feet, 40 chickens (feet included), and by my calculations, about 30 carp. A conga line of assistants is bringing in one-gallon containers of vegetable soup, which until last week appeared to have contained industrial paint. The film crew swiftly invades the scene, with Mack the fixer running point to befriend the responsible parties, armed with several packets of fags to hand out.

We get footage of the production line of chickens being slaughtered, boiled, plucked and skinned; the fish being gutted; the pigs being blowtorched, much of it in the open air on the waste ground by the power station, which is apparently where the happy couple’s home has been built. The blushing bride is four months pregnant, and reveals that there is no ceremony as such. Just her and her husband welcoming guests at a jerry-built arbour, she handing out melon seeds, and him handing out fags. If we’re lucky she will put on new tracksuit. Then they will stage eight or nine sittings for dinner to get through their thousand anticipated guests, and in the evening there will be some dancing.

So, not actually a wedding at all. Two common-law cohabitants are staging a dinner party presumably to get their hands on some gifts, as every one of the thousand guests is expected to hand over some money. But it’ll do. The director, who has been ill for a week and miserable for most of the shoot, is so pleased with herself for discovering this ready-made big finish for the episode that she smiles for a whole ten minutes.

We manage to interview the bride in her family’s restaurant in the afternoon. She turns out to be one of those people the camera loves, and goes from plain to gorgeous when Daniel the cameraman fiddles with his lenses. However, two other crew members have take over the interview, because I am temporarily indisposed, groaning on the throne back in the hotel (probably too much information for you, but nothing I have eaten has stayed inside me long for the last three days). Although I rush back to take my spot as the interviewer, they tell me to stay out of it, because they have “already established a rapport.” Which leaves me with nothing to do but grin like a loon at the back, as they crash the interview into the floor, distracting the subject, leading her into one-word answers, fluffing their questions and failing to pursue any new openings revealed in the answers.

I’d been feeling for a couple of days that I was not achieving much, but watching them tank it reminds me that I do often contribute to the production, sometimes in almost imperceptible ways like knowing what questions to ask. The ingredients list for the wedding menu above, for example, was something I assembled on my own initiative, sending Mack the fixer into the kitchen to get the precise numbers while the director was still trying to decide where to place the camera. It formed the basis of my 20 seconds on camera which would have otherwise been simply “Ooh, look, a wedding!”

The director growls a warning that I am starting to sound like Fluffy, her term of abuse for a presenter on another series who tried to turn everything into a cooking show. Before you ask, her term of abuse for me is either Chicken Wings, because of the way I stand, or Treediot, because I don’t know anything about plants.

I try very hard to enjoy myself on location. I see places that I would never in a million years even think of going to, and on the good days, there is lovely Chinese food. But on this trip we have been particularly out in the boonies, away from good restaurants and flushing toilets, and that has taken its toll. So instead I keep my mind on the money.

If we were better embedded in the village, it would have been fun for me to be one of the kitchen skivvies trying to feed a thousand people, but the best we can do is gawp at the industrial production-line quality of such a large-scale meal.

Mickey the sound man is waylaid by three girls plying brownish, gloopy local ale, and forced to drink three cups of it before he is allowed through the front gate. I myself have to keep moving to avoid similar aggressive hospitality. The director succumbs to a couple of the niblets in the kitchen, but soon cries off the food when she sees leftover soup being poured back into the industrial paint containers from whence it came, ready to be ladled out again to some other guest.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E04), 2018.

Mr He has nut-brown skin, burned like the Tibetans by the hot sun in the thin air of the Himalayan foothills. He is wearing the ankle-length scarlet robes of a Dongba shaman, and a five pointed cardboard crown decorated with visceral images of deities and animal spirits. There is a long necklace of coloured beads around his neck. He carries a sprig of mountain fir, a tambourine-like shamanic drum, a necklace made of bones and an ancient book of Naxi spells, written in tribal hieroglyphs. He is sitting in the back of the Buick, next to another Mr He, who is also nut-brown but with a dark, piratic moustache, clad from head to foot in army surplus camo gear. He is wearing a single leather glove, and perched on it is a hawk… which is also in the back of the car, occasionally flapping its wings in the shaman’s face.

Mickey is crammed into the passenger seat with all his sound gear, including a large fluffy boom mike that the hawk keeps mistaking for an otter. Luckily for us, there wasn’t enough room in the car for the three hunting dogs, because it already feels like I am driving down a bumpy mountain path with the cast of a Fellini film in the back. All we really need is a couple of dwarves and a pantomime horse’s head protruding from the sunroof. The glassy lake beneath us is called Yuhu, and we bump and jostle along a track that is usually reserved for ponies and quadbikes. It is the oddest and least enthusiastic session of carpool karaoke yet devised, as Mickey starts to sing Bohemian Rhapsody.

Just as a confusing week with the Kam was ultimately saved by a mud fight, our lacklustre showing with the Naxi is pinning all its hopes on a day on the mountain heaths with a bunch of falconers. Mack the fixer has asked Big Li to fix something up, and Big Li has reached outside the Li circle to the He family, who have rustled up some men with birds of prey and Swiss army knives, and a wizard. The idea is for the Dongba shaman to perform a ceremony to the gods of mountains and hunting, and for us to then go looking for pheasants among the rock-strewn meadows beneath the snow-capped peak of Jade Snow Mountain — original inspiration for Shangri-La and alleged home to the many couples from Naxi history who have committed double-suicide rather than submit to the pressure to marry their cousins.

But somewhere in all the fixers fixing with other fixers, something has been lost in translation. We wanted the hawking party for the whole day, preferably with a menagerie of spare pheasants we could release into the meadows for their own little version of the Hunger Games if the wild ones wouldn’t cooperate. For some reason, the bunch of dodgy-looking Naxi have shown up armed with little more than excuses. The hawk isn’t hungry enough. There are too many people on the hillside. The hawk is scared of Mickey’s boom mike. And they have only turned up with two spare pheasant-like birds as possible prey.

The hawk resolutely flies in precisely the opposite direction from any wild birds that the dogs faithfully root out, and is literally unable to grab a pheasant when one is held up in front of it. The director glumly gets some footage of me holding it (its talons remarkably gentle on my wrist, as if it is afraid of leaving a mark), and of Mr He the army-fatigues guy blowing his whistle and largely failing to get it to return. After half an hour, the pheasants have caught more prey than the hawk, and He the Hawker has resorted to using his GPS locator, which beeps angrily whenever it works out where the transponder on the back of the eagle is.

Daniel the cameraman is in a filthy mood. The director says it is because he has a cold, but I suspect it’s because of the crushing weight of wasted opportunity. Today’s set-up, if the fixer’s fixer’s fixer had got his ducks in a row, would have offered any cameraman a shot at an international award — wizards in the forest, and hawks coming out of the sky. But the prey won’t run, and the hawk won’t hunt, and the rare moments when there’s some action or chasing, Daniel invariably has the wrong lens on his camera, or ends up focussing on the wizard having a fag behind a tree. Then the hawkers reveal that this last half hour is all they have scheduled. Far from spending the day on the mountain, they have another hawking party to go to, and are ready to pack up and run off, observing with something of a hungry glint in their eyes that maybe we can come up with something better the day after tomorrow. The hawk has been so hapless at chasing the pheasants that we still have both of them alive, staring at us with what only can be described as avian sneers. We have barely seconds of footage, which causes Sohkiak to suggest that before the hunters go, we set up a scene where I drive the Buick across the mountainous landscape, with a camera stuck to the front of the car for a good view of our mad passengers.

The hunters all bugger off to a more interesting hunt somewhere else, and we are left with the Dongba shaman. He is as friendly as any wizard might be when offered a week’s wages to set fire to some twigs on a hillside, and gamely talks me through the career path of an exorcist and sometime children’s entertainer. He lights a pile of fir branches and intones dour prayers in Naxi to the gods of the mountain. He is much too polite to suggest that we might have avoided a lot of palaver if he had asked the gods’ permission before we started chasing a couple of pheasants around a lake, and that in terms of prioritising wizardry, we might have got what we deserved.

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

Mr Wang’s studio is literally next door to our hotel, which gives everybody a lie-in. I start to wish, however, that I had never got out of bed, since Mr Wang’s studio appears to specialise in pictures of pets. Why UNESCO accorded him intangible cultural heritage, I’ll never know, because his output seems to include funny pandas, twee scenes of traditional mountains-and-water, and the silk-weave equivalent of a painting of two dogs playing billiards.

The people in Mr Wang’s studio are heartily sick of film crews, and would really much prefer to be left to get on with their work. Mr Wang makes himself scarce when we arrive, thereby depriving us of the chance to interview anyone but his flunkies. But they tsk and tut and bend over their looms as I wander around them, enthusing to camera about the not-particularly-lost art of kesi, in a single 45-second speech that I manage to get right more often than not.

We drop in on a dye factory for more B-rolls, and then stop off at a water-town to send up the drone to get pictures of little pagodas and winding, flagstoned streets. This particular one, Shantang, stretches along either side of a seven-mile stretch of canal, and is infested with pushy rickshaw drivers and people who want to shout hello and/or stand behind the camera peering into the viewfinder.

The day finishes up back in Suzhou proper, next to another picturesque canal populated by fan shops, ice cream parlours and dumpling shops. We’ve come to see Chen Yingqin, a lady whose kesi is way, way better than Mr Wang’s. She seems to spend most of her time telling clueless customers in her shop that, no, the “watercolour” on the wall is not a watercolour at all, but actually an image composed of thousands of silk threads. She also does calligraphy, replicating everything from the pressure of the ink brush to little imperfections in the characters. I ask about one picture, of a Chinese landscape, and she confesses that it took her nine months.

The prices reflect this. A square embroidered image of a single Chinese character, (Chan, which is to say, what the Japanese call Zen), the size of an LP, retails at a steep £3000. She also makes wallets at £100 a throw, and similar luxury goods for the super-rich.

A neatly “printed” series of characters on gold silk is recognisable to me from the simple layout, even before I get close enough to read it, or its title.

“Is that the Heart Sutra?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, flabbergasted. “I am slightly disconcerted that you know that.”

She is giggly and vivacious in her interview, which makes a nice change from stage-struck old men, and seems genuinely sorry to see us go. She even laughs along when the producer and I have a fight about the statue on the mantelpiece, with her maintaining that it is Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and me maintaining that it is Buddha himself.

“If it’s Guanyin,” I protest, “then where are her tits?”

Apparently it is Buddha. Although Guanyin is also Buddha. It’s complicated.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S02E04 (2016)