I’m finding it a little bit difficult to breathe. Kunming is a mile above sea level, which makes itself felt in the time it takes to boil water, the dryness of the air, and the fact that I am out of breath after racing up a flight of stairs. But it is a wonderfully clean city, there are lot more pretty girls here than in most other parts of China (our director says the boys are good-looking, too), and the people are oddly friendly. At one point today we were mobbed by ten policemen, who had not been informed that we would be filming outside the museum, but they were all very polite and smiley, and once our credentials were proven, bent over backwards to help us, stopping the traffic and even giving our sound man and his gear a lift to the entrance.

The new Yunnan Provincial Museum glows red-gold in the sunrise. It has been designed, supposedly, to resemble the famous Yunnan Stone Forest. But it is packed with materials from the culture that once flourished on the shores of Lake Dian, which had largely faded from view by the end of the Han dynasty.

Nothing survives of the Dian people but the stories about them in the Grand Scribe’s Records, and whatever has been pulled out of their graves. And with the caveat that the graves reflect the lives and attitudes of the ruling elite, it shouldn’t surprise us if their artefacts come across as a bit, well, cruel. The Dian kingdom, at the time it was assimilated into the empire of the Han Chinese, was home to a peaceful race of cattle herdsmen, ruled over by an equestrian elite who seemed to take an odd pleasure in depictions of violence.

Their shell kettles (cowrie shells were money) come decorated with intricate battle scenes, featuring captives being dragged away for sale, victims pleading for their lives, and a wounded man crawling from the battlefield, unaware that a mounted cavalryman is bearing down on him. In one of the tableaux, an enemy soldier appears to have the upper hand, not seeing the man on the other side of the battlefield taking aim with one of those new-fangled crossbows.

The glee in which the Dian seemed to take in the suffering of others is repeated throughout their artefacts. Twin spearheads feature decorations of dangling slaves, hanging by their wrists. Belt buckles feature scenes of boars fighting panthers, and lions locked in combat. The most famous Dian artefact is a low bronze ritual table in the shape of a cow being mauled by a tiger, and yet still standing protectively over its calf.

Several archaeologists have suggested that the Cow and Tiger Table is loaded with symbolism – that the cow represents the locals, while the tiger stands for their horrid overlords, and the calf for local traditions that refuse to be snuffed out. The rulers of Dian, it has been suggested, were originally a band of Scythians, pushed out of Central Asia around 200 BC, who lorded it over the locals in Yunnan until the Chinese turned up to turn the tables.

The Dian themselves disappeared from history around the time that the Grand Scribe’s Records wrote them up. They were invaded by warriors from Chu in the late Warring States Period, and the victorious general was just about to report home when Chu fell to the First Emperor. Rather than return to an uncertain future, he turned his army around and settled by the Expansive Lake (Dian), and his soldiers soon faded into the local population, whose former style favoured dreadlocked horsemen, barefoot in all statuary and carving, tattooed with writhing snakes. They enjoyed what UNESCO still describes as the most biologically diverse region in the world, spanning the upper reaches of the Yangtze (here known as the Golden Sands), the Mekong (here known as the Lancang) and the Salween (here simply called Nu, the Angry River). Since the Red River, which goes all the way to Hanoi, also rises here, the Dian kingdom sat the crossroads of several major cultures, trading with the Shu and Ba kingdoms of Sichuan, with what is now Vietnam, and towards the west.

Fan Haitao, who set up the Dian gallery in the Yunnan Provincial Museum, takes me through a small selection of the foreign objects dug up locally, including a buckle representing a winged lion (lions, winged or otherwise, being unknown in China back at that time) seemingly from Persia or Afghanistan, agate beads from Pakistan, and glass from India.

“Our biggest find,” he reveals, “was at a place called Yangfutou, which was under the flight path of the Flying Tigers.” The American mercenary airmen, famously posted to Yunnan to make life miserable for the Japanese, used to fly over a low hill near their base, and observe that it was a nice place to be buried. Yangfutou was turned into a graveyard for the Flying Tigers, which was when diggers started to unearth strange objects. It was not, however, until 1999, that Yangfutou revealed its greatest treasure, the grave of a forgotten Dian nobleman, complete with cowrie shell moneybags, bronze drums, and fiendishly decorated weaponry.

“The grave was under the water table,” he tells me, “so it was completely waterlogged. This meant that we didn’t just get the bronze, but some wooden pieces and the lacquerwork ancestors.” He points at a series of animal-headed dildos, the word “ancestor” also meaning “penis” in Chinese.

So, I ask innocently, what were they used for?

“I think,” he says carefully, “they had a… ritual quality.”

Why are they so small, I ask, pointing at the largest one, which is truly massive. But we can’t use the footage, because the crew was giggling so much at the look on his face.

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

The gold ingots are roughly the size of iPhones, and the company gets them from the Nanjing bank. Then then put them through a machine that hammers them, repeatedly, until one gold ingot is nine metres long and as thin as a sheet of paper. Then they hammer them again, and again and again. And when they are small CD-sized roundels of thin gold, they cut them into squares and cut the squares into smaller squares, and then they hammer them again, until they are literally as thin as a cicada’s wings.

Miss Li is part of the process. She has to take a roundel of beaten gold, tease it gently off the paper with a goose feather, and then move it onto a new piece of paper, blowing gently on it to flatten it and move it around.

“It is very difficult training,” she says. “You have to pass exam where you blow middle candle out of three, without blowing out other two. Training for blow job took me eighteen months.”

I nod sagely.

Nanjing used to be called Jinling (Gold Hill), so the gold foil company based here couldn’t resist calling itself Jinling. Mr Ge, who is the sixth generation of his family to oversee Miss Li and her colleagues, takes me around the factory, and we have fun banging on an anvil with hammers, which was the way things were done before they automated so many elements of the process.

He takes me to the showroom, which is a Trumpish extravaganza of gold leaf on everything – gold leaf pianos, gold leaf Buddhas and other tat. Waiting for us there, unexpectedly, is his foreign liaison Viviana, a young Italian artist of some renown, who works with gold leaf in some of her paintings, and has ended up as a part-time greeter for foreign bigwigs who come to talk about painting their toilets gold, or something.

Viviana is very easy on the eye, and I think she would make a striking interviewee as both artist and employee, a welcome change from our usual run of middle-aged men, but the director immediately assumes that she works in another capacity and shouts at me to “stop chatting up the Russian” and to get on my marks ready to interview Mr Ge. He talks for a while about the history of gold leaf in Nanjing, and delicately describes his customers as devout religious believers, and not, say, ghastly billionaires. And that is another day done.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E06 (2019).

In 886, during the last days of the Tang dynasty, the poet Wei Zhuang dropped in on Nanjing, once a great capital, now a forgotten backwater, its walls in disrepair, and its canals choked with weeds. He wrote:

Drizzle on the river, and the reeds grow high / The Six Dynasties are but a dream, and the birds call in the sky / Cares not the willow by the walls / Ten leagues around in the smoky mist.

Nanjing has improved a lot in the sun. The remains of the walls still bracket a sizeable chunk of Xuanwu Lake, just to the north of the old city, and are dotted with Ming- and Qing-era cannons poking from the crenellations. The park is nice with autumn trees and the Jiming temple looms above outside the city walls. So we ought to get some nice shots that make Nanjing look less like an urban jungle in the rain, and more like a pleasant bit of park life. The Propaganda Bureau should be pleased, as well they should be when the woman who mans the gate to the city walls insists on taking a photograph of us filming the sign so she can send it to her boss.

We put on the most ridiculous charade of setting up a shot by the sign, with me not bothering to take off my sunglasses, Mickey the sound man not bothering to boom, and Eric the cameraman not even starting the camera.

“Are we rolling?” calls the director.

“Nope!” says Eric, with a thumbs-up.

“Action!”

“I’m standing here next to a sign,” I say earnestly, “while a woman in a mustard yellow puffa jacket films me with her phone.”

“And cut!”

Michelle rushes in with her clapperboard and brightly says: “Waste of Time Fake Thing, Take One!”

We lurk around the walls for a while, which are picturesque but thick with flies, and then head off to the Longjiang Shipyard Ruins.

The layout will be familiar to anyone who has been to London Docklands. Three long strips of water, each the size of an airport runway, run in parallel through what is now billed as a park. But this park was the site of the Ming-era shipyards where the Treasure Fleet was built, and from where it set sail, down the Yangtze and as far as Africa. The lakes are all that remains of docks four, five and six. One, two and three, of similar size, are buried somewhere under the nearby housing estate.

Everybody knows the story of Zheng He, or at least thinks they know: the boy captured at the fall of Yuan-era Yunnan, castrated and shipped off to Beijing aged ten as a slave to the Yongle Emperor. Originally named Ma, short for Mohammed, for he was a Muslim, he was renamed Zheng in honour of his spirited defence of the Zhengcunba reservoir during the dastardly Yongle’s grab for power. Eventually put in charge of the Treasure Fleet, he set sail for the south and the west in 1405 on the first of what would become seven voyages, designed to tell all the natives in far-flung kingdoms just how awesome China was. When he came home, he turned up with a giraffe, so everybody was happy. Just for kicks, I pace out the rudder in the museum, which is 14 metres long, with a flappy bit that comprises the bottom six metres. The people from Propaganda, ever willing to say no to everything, have told us that we can film in the dockyards but that we can’t film the replica ship at one end of it, because it might be moved by the time our film broadcasts. Or it might not.

Suspicious, I pace out the length of the ship and find it to be 73 metres – a perfectly reasonable size for a Chinese trading galleon, but nothing like the aircraft-carrier sized behemoths claimed by some of the world’s more breathless popular historians. The shipyards are very long indeed, but even the artists’ impressions in the nearby museum show several ships being built at once in any single dock. They were not, and never were intended to hold single giant galleons. If they were, there would not have been enough turning space to get them out of the gate and into the Qinhuai River to sail down to the Yangtze and out to sea.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E06 (2019).

After successfully chasing the Mongols out of China, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, Hongwu, tried to erase his humble, rebellious origins by aspiring to be the perfect ruler. And the perfect emperor needed an ideal capital, so he planned one out in Nanjing. The Nanjing Museum is set in the grounds of his palace, a Forbidden City manqué climbing up the side of a hill with a view of the city walls. And since it’s Monday and the museum is closed to the public, we have it to ourselves except for the fidgeting security guards, and a man from the propaganda office, who is putting a brave face on the fact that he is incredibly bored.

Nanjing’s history goes back to the Stone Age, although the museum concentrates on those moments in Chinese history when it was a capital. When the Han dynasty fell in 220 AD, China spent 350 years in a state of disunity, and Zhuge Liang, a ministerial adviser to one of the upstart kingdoms, recommended Nanjing as the ideal location for capital. It had, he said, mountains around it like a crouching tiger and a coiling dragon, and the river Yangtze acted as a natural moat. When northern China fell to barbarian invaders, the nomads couldn’t make it south of the Yangtze, turning Nanjing into a bastion of old culture and a guardian of Chinese heritage.

I have to do pieces to camera in front of the museum’s various displays – Nanjing has been a sort of capital of China for several cumulative centuries, but for most of those times, it was in one of the squib dynasties of the Dark Ages, when it was only really the capital not of an empire, but of a glorified kingdom in the lower Yangtze area. When even educated foreigners are unlikely to be able to name half a dozen major Chinese dynasties, it is tough to run through the likes of the Liu Song, the Chen and the Southern Qi, none of which lasted for more than a few decades, but all of which were centred on Nanjing, quite probably the greatest city in the world at the time. I pick a giant stone pixiu, a chimera-like mythological beast from the squib emperors’ tombs, as a means of pointing out that they achieved some big things and had an enduring culture, even if the family at the top switched around a few times.

I am actually a huge fan of the Six Dynasties — I love it as one of those neglected periods in Chinese histories, and I am a sad enough Six Dynasties nerd that I could indeed be found on the day of the release of the Cambridge History of China: Six Dynasties, waiting outside the Cambridge University Press bookshop for it to open. Good job, too, because they only had one copy in stock of their new £115 monster, so I got in there ahead of the rush.

We point the camera at ceramic, open-mouthed rhinos, made as bespoke piss-pots for Six Dynasties emperors, as well as fragments of Nanjing’s famous Porcelain Tower, a diorama of the old Yuecheng (Fortress of the Viet) built on the future site of Nanjing by the king of Wu to watch over the conquered 5th century BC kingdom of Yue. The security guards lurk glumly, ordered to be on their feet whenever we are around, and hence forced to be on their feet all day.

A bunch of them sit around in their office smoking fags, leading to the fantastically Chinese moment when their closed circuit TV monitors show our director lighting up behind the toilets in the park, and they rush out to tell her that the whole facility is Non-Smoking. Except, apparently, their office, which has so much smoke billowing out of it that you would be forgiven for thinking it was on fire.

The curator Wu Tian starts off a little timid and unsure of himself. But we get him to show us some of his favourite pieces in the museum, and he starts talking with true passion and excitement about truly weird items. One is a bit of road with ruts worn by four hundred years of ox-carts. Another looks like a mini bedpan, but turns out to be a Six Dynasties iron for smoothing clothes flat. Another looks like half a toilet seat on legs, but is instead a sort of arm rest for people on divans in a culture that has yet to invent the chair.

“I suppose not,” I wonder aloud, “because after all, the chair is a Song-dynasty innovation.”

Mr Wu stands bolt upright, as if poked with a cattle prod. Not for the first time on this shoot, the fact that I am not only listening, but can say something relevant in Chinese makes his eyes stick out on stalks, and suddenly he is twice as animated and excited. The interview goes swimmingly well, since he has worked out that I am not some fat white sock puppet, but an actual historian who knows his Han from his Ming. So he chats excitedly about Dark Age hairstyles and roof tiles, and saves the best till last.

“Now this, he says, “is my favourite. We found it smashed into a hundred pieces in a Nanjing grave, and we put it back together. It’s a glass cup, from a time when China didn’t have any glass blowers. We think it came from the Eastern Roman Empire, by sea, and ended up in Guangzhou, from where it made its way north to Nanjing as some sort of curio to impress visitors. The grave was a wealthy merchant’s, but this isn’t the only Roman glass we’ve found in Nanjing. It’s actually the twelfth.”

Camera A on the interviewee, B-roll on the interviewer, me interjecting with actual questions that make it clear we are not some bored school party fubbing with our phones, but a bunch of people who have come to Nanjing specifically to talk about the Six Dynasties, the squib dynasties that everybody usually ignores. Mr Wu is very pleased, and thanks us profusely for actually knowing what he is talking about. I get the feeling it’s a rare occurrence.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appear in Route Awakening S05E06 (2019).