An 0545 start, up for breakfast and in the van for the two-hour drive to Weinan, the home town of Xi Jinping’s dad. For this reason, this city in the middle of nowhere has an incredibly swish hotel, in which every room looks like a suite. I have another robot bathroom with automatic, motion-sensitive lights, and two complimentary condoms, courtesy of the Weinan Health & Safety Initiative. What on earth do they imagine goes on this hotel? Not a lot tonight, because the film crew will be the only people staying.

Our merry band of nine (the crew and two drivers) has now swelled to eleven, since the guy from the Buick dealership (our sponsors) has decided to bring his parents along. Christ knows what he must have said to them when he got home yesterday, but presumably they were very excited to sample the glamour. It’s a ridiculously unprofessional thing to do, and makes us look like a convoy of muppets.

They are underfoot all morning, soon as bored as only a spare wheel on a film location can be, and largely have to be left at a remote farmhouse while the rest of us shuttle backwards and forwards on a mountain road through fields of corn.

The morning is dedicated to getting shots of me driving the Buick up hairpin turns on mountain roads – a disastrous prospect remedied by getting the driver to do all the hard work, and me to do all the bits that are straight lines and close-ups. We are in the foothills of the Qinling mountains, in sight of Huashan, with the peaks in the misty distance, and endless fields of ripening corn. It’s going to look great, although we still manage to attract eleven dicks on mopeds who stand around pointing at us and asking what we are doing.

Mickey the Mic is the sound man, so spends all day with eight kilos of recording equipment strapped to his front like a cybernetic beer-gut. You can tell which one he is, because his regulation-issue floppy sunhat has holes cut in the brim for his headphones. He is Singaporean, with the odd lilt that makes him sound Indian lah, and has the Singaporean habit of injecting the Chinese particle denoting a change in circumstance into the end of any sentence where it would be relevant. I have started to pick up the pidgin English of the crew, and was heard at one point today saying: “Soon be dark lah.”

Mickey is also the drone man, which means that he swaps his sound rig for a complex remote-control tray, with which he joysticks our robot team member Yuneec Q500 Typhoon, a squat, sleek metal dragonfly with four rotors and a gimbal-mounted camera with a 16-gigabyte memory card. Unfortunately, its batteries only last for ten minutes at a time, which means the crew need to be absolutely, totally sure where everybody is, and that the shot is ready, before they send the Typhoon into the air. It can hover with almost perfect stillness if the wind is low, and even has a nifty function called Follow Me, whereby it will zip along at a pre-set distance from whoever is holding a thumb-operated remote-control beacon.

This is how we pay the bills. Buick are fronting the cost for the entire series, as long as their vehicles get 30 seconds of screen time in each episode, which apparently still works out cheaper for them than making an actual TV commercial. We’ve given their car advert-level exposure as it roars up the mountain road and skids around corners, occasionally with me at the wheel, occasionally with my stunt double while I duck in the back seat with a walkie-talkie, yelling instructions in Chinese.

We are up in the hills to see Master Wei Jinquan, who performs Huaxian Shadow Plays. I am dreading it, but he turns out to be very chatty and a perfect interviewee, ready to rattle on without pause for five minutes after the most minimal of prompting. He is the nth generation of his family to make, paint and perform shadow puppetry and lives in a village that was once home to dozens of performers. Today, it is a cluster of huts populated almost solely by the elderly and their grandchildren – the adult generation having migrated to the city to work.

We talk for an hour on his roof terrace in the sun, and then he leads me down to his workshop, where he attempts to teach me how to cut the translucent cowhide that makes the puppets. The hide has the look and consistency of an A4 sheet of human fingernail, and he tuts and fusses over me while I hold the knife wrong, put it at the wrong angle, and fail to move the leather (you move the leather, not the knife) on the wooden palette. The crew are all snickering as he calls me a moron, and I protest to the camera that every time he instructs me, he adds an “and one more thing…” that I could have done with knowing before I start. I am also mic’ed up and able to mutter asides regarding my fear that he is going to stab me with his awl if I get it wrong again. It should be quite funny, and only two days in, we are already establishing a general tone of arch sarcasm that I think I can probably keep up.

At one point, the crew are repositioning the camera to zoom in on my hands at work, so I attempt to explain to him what’s going to happen.

“Now I’m going to do it wrong again,” I warn him.

“Well, you don’t seem capable of doing it any other way,” he mutters.

For me, the great relief is that I am able to function fully in Mandarin all day without holding up a professional film crew, although I am probably operating right at my ceiling of competence. It doesn’t help that I keep forgetting the word for shadow puppet, which is pi’ying. The clock sneaks towards six, and I realise that we are done for the day, suffusing me with a great sense of relief and tiredness, and what appears to be ten or fifteen minutes of material for the final edit – a good haul for a day in which we banked maybe three hours of footage.

Then it turns out that there has been a miscommunication. He hasn’t realised that we are staying the night in Weinan, and thought we would be filming a performance at a Xi’an theatre tomorrow. No, says the director, we will film you here tomorrow. But if she wants it traditional, it has to be at night, and by tomorrow night we will be on our way to the airport. Reluctantly, she decides to stay and shoot a performance in the village, which means waiting until after dark while Master Wei’s teammates set up the travelling theatre in the car park in front of his house.

The local villagers come out to gawp, and a gaggle of little girls sit in a line on a log for a while, looking cute until one of them initiates a farting competition. Others lurch and stamp around the car park, trying to catch crickets in their hands. Alvin the cameraman sets up the back-up camera to shoot in time-lapse, as four old men lash together a rickety series of trestles to create a giant punch-and-judy shed, faced by a white cloth the size of a very large widescreen television. They all clamber inside, with screechy Chinese instruments and gongs, with Master Wei sitting at the centre, his puppets at the ready. They then start clattering out a wailing Chinese song, and the shadows start moving, with the story of Pigsy Eats Some Watermelons, and some martial arts thing about two generals and a comedy horse fighting each other until someone dies.

Alvin clambers into the staging area to film among the team as they perform, and so we get the same play from two different angles. Reaction shots, however, are all going to be mine, because the crowd seems indifferent. The little girls are soon ignoring the play and instead crowding around each other to take selfies of themselves not-watching the play. A boy on roller skates trips over the power cable, and a small sausage dog starts eating someone’s discarded snotrag. Master Wei finishes to no applause, which seems to be how these things are done, and the crowd melts away back to their shacks.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S02E05 (2016).

We have a van that could seat twelve, but the rear four sets are folded up for all the gear. There are nine of us today. Two drivers (one with a loaner Buick for the beauty shots), the director, the cameraman, the sound-and-drone guy, the grip, the girl with a clipboard and the fixer. Oh, and me – nearly forgot. I am the “talent”, and my talent is having to say precisely the right words, in precisely the right order, in the sole 20-second window I am liable to get in the midst of a quarter-hour’s faffery. This is harder than it sounds, because it is 77 degrees in the shade, I have to wear oddly warm clothes to fit the continuity, our very presence draws crowds of people who are both noisy and distracting, and everything I say has to be written on the fly, but also factually accurate, and verifiable by two sources – those sources not to include online editable wikis. Otherwise, anything I say can be questioned by National Geographic S&P (Standards and Practices) back in Washington, and the footage will be useless. There is no space for an umm or an err… I cannot get any proper nouns even slightly wrong. I can’t repeat any words in any given speech.

Out to the long road south of the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, so we can do some shots of the Buick driving around past Chinesey things. The car we are using in on loan from the Xi’an dealership, so we have a driver wearing my shirt just in case the clothes are visible through the window, driving through all the fiddly bits. All I have to do is drive in a straight line from one point to another on two occasions, so they can get footage of me at the wheel in a built-up area.

As the crew start to set up, the security guards assemble. First a passing lady with a red armband. Then two men with walkie talkies and red armbands. Then three men with pressure hoses, washing the nearby statues, also with armbands. One of them stands right in front of the camera, calmly and without rancour. He won’t get out of the way until he sees our pass. We don’t have one, and when the fixer rings through to the tourist office who is supposed to have given us one, they don’t know who she is. We waste nearly an hour while she faffs with them, while the red armband stands in our way. Eventually, she returns with a signed form, and he pretends to have forgotten that we are there, walking away talking to an imaginary interlocutor on his phone.

Up to the Great Wild Goose Pagoda itself for me to do a 20-second piece to camera about how it was built as a repository for Tripitaka’s Buddhist scrolls. This takes two hours, because the camera has to be set up, the sound checked, the area cleared, the script agreed upon, and then a bunch of arseholes with mopeds and plastic machine guns cleared out of the way. Our new-found filming liaison, a specky woman in a mauve blouse, frets that by walking from the south side of the tower to the north side, we have effectively walked out of her jurisdiction, and so might face more red armbands at any moment. Meanwhile, crowds of people assemble nearby, pointing their iPhones at us and trying to work out if I am someone famous.

Up to the Muslim Quarter for biang biang noodles for lunch. We luck into a relatively deserted Muslim restaurant where I can talk to camera about the history of this particular dish – international as it is, with American chilis and tomatoes, carrots and cumin from westwards on the silk road, noodles made from wheat, etc. The restaurant staff are also not camera-shy at all, and keen to let the cameraman film them at work. It is a national holiday, so outside it is utter chaos. But we get lots of footage in the can.

Then the Tang Western Market for me to talk about the origin of the Silk Road, and finishing up at the Forest of Lions on the campus of the Xi’an College of Fine Arts. Or is it the Arts University? Or is it the Xi’an University of the Arts? Got to get it right, and got to get it right before the light goes, and before that old lady behind me throws bread to the ducks, or we need to change a camera battery, or before someone’s car alarm goes off.

At the end of the day, I ask the director how much footage we have got of the 132 minutes we need. She thinks maybe 60 seconds. But it was our first day, the crowds were distracting, and we lost an hour to battery hunts and an hour to official interference. It could be worse, and tomorrow should be better. Although tomorrow may be a different story, because I will be in a town I have never been before, talking about puppets.

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

On the wall in the Yuxi Bronze Museum is a giant set of bamboo strips, engraved with classical Chinese. This is where I earn my money.

“Aha,” I say to the camera, “here we’ve got the entire text of the chapter of the Grand Scribe’s Records about the ‘south-western barbarians’. It starts with a geographical description of the region, the names of the tribes (see, here’s the Dian), and the lay of the land, and then it goes into the story of their first contact with the Chinese. Here we get the emissaries turning up from the Han Emperor, and a fantastic question from the Dian king, when he asks the ambassadors: ‘Is this Han realm bigger than mine?’ He really had no idea who he was dealing with, but when he finally submitted to the Han emperor, here it is, he is bestowed with a ‘royal seal’.”

It’s a good morning in the bronze museum, where the staff stare open-mouthed in amazement as the foreign film crew completely ignores most of their exhibits, and concentrates on the stuff they consider boring – the bamboo strips carved with Chinese, and a naff-seeming diorama of life in Dian times. Except it’s not naff, I point out. Every single element of it has been drawn directly from the bronzes we have been examining. We have seen (and filmed) the original artefacts that informed the diorama’s hunting scene, its battle scene, and the scene of human sacrifice underway on a nearby hilltop.

Lunch is a fish hotpot cooked on hot stones, with Yunnan rice, which is like normal rice but comes with fried potatoes and bits of bacon. The director allows us fifteen minutes to descend like jackals on a nearby pottery shop, where I spend all the money I have earned this morning buying a new tea set, rice bowls and two cups decorated with the Heart Sutra. I think, between us, we manage to spend about £300, which makes the owner’s day, as she only opened ten minutes beforehand.

In the afternoon, we head out to a pokey village at the bottom of a mountain, where the locals inexplicably worship a mermaid goddess, whose pert baps seem to have been designed by a sculptor who has never seen a woman’s chest in real life. A cluster of pensioners, sunning themselves in the marketplace, soon drift over like zombies to see what the film crew is up to, but they are incredibly friendly, and our cameraman gets a lovely shot of me talking to three wizened old men about topless mermaids.

We are here to climb Lijiashan, the mountain where some eighty Dian kingdom graves were unearthed. It involves a wheezing ascent up endless steps, to a small guardhouse where we find Zhang Lineng, the watchman.

A huge part of my job, and something I am embracing with greater fervour as time goes by, lies in putting the interviewees at ease. Mr Zhang didn’t even know he was an interviewee before we showed up, and I am the first foreigner he has ever met. But I bound in and introduce myself, and get him chatting about his life.

Our fixer and Clicky the Propaganda Guy, who is still lurking around, protest that the man’s Chinese is unintelligible, and that we might need an interpreter. But he makes perfect sense to me, no more or less than anyone else. This has happened before, in Shandong, where Chinese people found locals difficult to understand, but I found them no harder to understand than anyone else. The local accent fiendishly replaces all H’s with F’s, and occasionally drifts towards Cantonese, but that’s it.

So he takes me around the pit where the Famous (not that famous) Cow Tiger Table was unearthed, and reminisces about how strange it was to the local villagers, like him, when their hilltop was suddenly deemed so important that the People’s Liberation Army sent an armed detachment to guard it.

Mr Zhang is a rare kind of interviewee, because he is a Michael Wood sort of choice – not an archaeologist or a historian, but a random man of the people who happens to work near the site. So while it’s not quite the usual National Geographic experience, it is oddly entertaining. He reminisces about how weird it was when he was a boy, and truckloads of archaeologists started turning up at the village at the bottom of the mountain, and how was there, literally standing at the side of Pit 69, when they unearthed a bronze cowrie shell container, decorated with dancing Central Asian shamans. He also reveals that the grave contained two bodies, a woman and a murdered slave girl, but that the coffin the archaeologists found was inexplicably thrown away.

I ask him about life as a security guard.

“It was tough in the early days. The thing that’s made the biggest difference is the phone. If there are robbers on the site, I can call for back-up. I can call the police. Or someone who sees something suspicious can just call me. Life is a lot easier now.”

I ask if things get creepy up on the mountain alone at night.

“Well, down in the village people say that sometimes they can hear fighting. Swords clashing together and people screaming in a language they don’t understand. There was one night when I heard a real commotion outside, but when I came out to look, nobody was there.”

Clicky the Propaganda Guy is gesticulating wildly, calling a time-out on something he really doesn’t want discussed on camera. Second-hand local myths are one thing, but a self-reported experience of the supernatural will not be allowed on television in China.

At which point, the director slaps me in the face.

She had seen a mosquito on my cheek, and took extreme action in a split-second, lest it suck my blood and leave a lump on my face sure to ruin the next week’s filming. Her palm lands with an impressively loud whack, and oblivious to the reason why, all Mr Zhang sees is a small Chinese woman beating up the presenter.

“Wow,” he says. “You have a tough job.”

Our pocket drone struggles like the Little Engine That Could against the high winds on the mountain top. There is just time to rush back to the Bronze Museum, which now has the sun on its façade, to shoot the opening shot of me entering. Except the museum has closed five minutes early and the staff have scarpered, so we have to cheat by placing the camera on the other side of the street, and having me walk across the road as if it is the path leading up to the door. But we have to wait first for a marching column of soldiers to pass by. They stare at me warily, until I give the Communist Party salute, at which point they all start giggling and saluting back.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E05 (2019).

Up at 0630 for the two-hour drive around the lake to the village where Yang Shaohua has his gallery and workshop. I blunder in late, thanks to having the wrong address, and find him holding court around a posh tea table, chuffing on a water pipe like a giant bronze bong.

Mr Yang is handsome and charming, knowledgeable and talented. I know that sounds like me buttering up some Party bigwig, but he knows the bronze-casting process so well that he can give a ten-minute speech in answer to a simple question about how it’s done. He knows everything from the chemical formulae to the metallurgy mix, and he doesn’t just cast the bronze, but carves the models and draws the original concept artwork. He is also a great host, faffing with his tea paraphernalia while the crew smokes fags in his gallery, so much so, that we seem to lose over an hour during the day to tea.

Mr Yang is responsible for a lot of the statues I have marvelled at in Chinese public spaces, including the giant golden phoenix in front of the Yunnan Provincial Museum. He tells me about the three-metre Mother of Dragons he made for a temple to the Baiyi people’s famous rain goddess, and his biggest-ever Buddha, a ten-metre effigy for a temple somewhere. At the moment, he is working on soldiers for the Songshan military memorial, although when he leads me into the modelling room, I am surprised to find four life-sized clay men standing to attention in puttees, pith helmets and Hitler moustaches.

“They are Japanese devils,” he explains. “They get a lot of Japanese tourists there, so I suppose it does no harm to give them something to take a selfie with.” The Japanese soldiers all have real shoelaces and stitching, because it’s easier to do that and let the wax mould take an impression from the real thing, than it is to painstakingly carve them.

Since he is an official Intangible National Treasure, the Propaganda Bureau are all over this one like a rash. A beaming woman in clacking heels keeps ruining the sound recording, while her minion with a clicky camera keeps wandering into the background of every shot.

“A cameraman,” mutters our director, “of all people, should know not to ruin someone else’s shot.” She is particularly annoyed because Propaganda are insisting on “entertaining” us at a lunch banquet, which gives us only an hour to shoot our interview before we are dragged off to a restaurant with eleven other people, and forced to make small talk with a bunch of local officials only there for the free boondoggle, who manage to piss me off from the get-go by asking me if I can use chopsticks.

Bearing in mind that I had walked into the room, introduced myself in Mandarin, and embarked upon a conversation about Bronze Age culture in south-west China, I think my “of course” was an object lesson in tact. The last thing I want is chili fish-head soup for lunch, and the last thing our director needs is an hour ripped out of her shooting schedule a mere hour after we started.

Mr Yang, in the meantime, is having a whale of a time talking to us about his work, which often involves reproductions of Dian Kingdom artefacts. The museum people, in fact, have so much trust in him that they have let him digitally scan all the Dian Kingdom finds, and he does a roaring trade in replicas of the Famous (not that famous) Cow and Tiger Table.

He warms to me right away when I correctly identify a taotie totem beast on a replica Shang cauldron, and immediately ask him if a stylised goat was made for Yuexiu park in Guangzhou. I am, in fact, able to tell him that I have seen several of his statues in various parts of China.

“Do you need a bronze bust of yourself?” he asks. “I can knock one up for £3,000.”

No, I say. Nobody is interested in seeing my bust.

It’s not the easiest of days, because shooting in a foundry next to a building site is a non-stop cacophony that plays havoc with the sound. Nor do we have footage of several parts of the process, including the all-important molten bronze bit – we are trusting Mr Yang to send us something shot with his phone. It doesn’t help that the gallery has three mangy guard dogs who have industriously shat everywhere. But Mr Yang shows me how to pour wax into the mould to make my very own Famous (not that famous) Cow and Tiger Table.

The wax is then wrapped in clay, and the clay mould thus formed is heated until the wax flows away, leaving space for the molten bronze.

“Of course,” he says, “back in the old times they used beeswax, but these days we use the industrial variety.”

The word for honey in Old Chinese is an Indo-European import, mjit (as in mead), implying that honey husbandry, like chariots, is something that came into China with foreign settlers sometime in the Bronze Age. And that means that the Bronze Age itself could also very likely have been something imposed on the Chinese by foreign invaders – mysterious elites like those Dian warriors.

“Oh, I’m not surprised,” says Clicky the Cameraman from Propaganda, as we sit around the tea table for yet another break. “I mean, there’s a whole foreign city under the water of the lake here. They found it when they were laying cables for the power plant, and the government banned anyone from investigating further.”

The underwater city in Fuxian Lake was supposedly carbon-dated to 250 BC, around the time of the Dian Kingdom, but our director refuses to believe it. She suspects that the whole thing was a hoax thought up by local students to promote tourism in the region. “Not really,” claims Clicky from Propaganda. “The reason there hasn’t been any news about it since 2007 is that we’ve put a blanket ban on talking about it.”

Mr Yang doesn’t want us to leave. He lures us back to the tea table for another cup, and then points out that because we have a two-hour drive home and it’s already six, we might as well stay in town for dinner.

“I know of a lovely place nearby that does traditional peasant food,” he promises. It’s only when we are standing outside that he proudly announces: “The specialties are fish-head soup and tripe.”

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

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).

Frances has egg in her pants. It turns out that the one our producer took from the pile near the toaster in the hotel was not hard-boiled at all, a fact she only realised when she put it in her pocket and then accidentally sat on it 20 minutes later. She’s washed her clothes in a bucket and is hanging them out to dry in the van. Now we look like a proper Chinese film crew, with laundry drying on the equipment.

Today we are in Linyi, a town I have never heard of, where there is apparently a standing film set. I was looking forward to doing a walking shot in a traditional Chinese town, only to walk around a corner to reveal that all the buildings are two-dimensional flats, and to reveal the whole crew standing there with their boom mikes and fags. But we have been warned that the film set is infested with professional spanners, who make it their life’s work to wander into shot and then demand reimbursement to leave. So instead we are sticking to the main plan, which is to film Luqin opera.

None of us are all that clear about what Luqin opera is. It is something specific to Shandong, but nobody was sober enough last night to Google it. Liu Lili is the perky actress who will explain it all to us, but she doesn’t have a whole lot to say about it, and any goodwill is soon squandered by the crew. I ask her if she has any experience with filming rather than stage acting, and she claims to know the score, but she becomes plainly frustrated when her 90-minute make-up regime is constantly interrupted by lighting changes and backtracks. Nor is she all that keen on putting make-up on me, for that is the sort of job they give to the interns, not the star of the show.

Her dresser arrives at 11 in the morning, striding into the backstage area and asking: “Have you finished yet?” We have barely started, and Miss Liu is already in a strop. I try to draw her out about the pieces of hair she sets on her head, her adornments and her make-up, but she has already retreated into snappy monosyllables.

There has been a distinct lack of communication all round. The theatre band arrives ready to play along with Wedding at a Funeral, only to discover that she plans to sing an aria from Meeting My Mother-in-Law. So we have to resort to her miming to a backing track of her own voice as she jauntily rides an imaginary donkey to the tune of an off-key rendition of Knees Up Mother Brown. Then she stuffs me into a bright scarlet scholar’s robe, gets the lippy girl to put on almost all of my make-up, and deigns to be on camera for ten seconds at the end putting the finishing touches to my rouge.

Filming in theatres always seems to go wrong. I blame the clash of two entirely different production regimes in a confined space. The opera troupe have just got back yesterday from a four-province tour, and they are all exhausted. I ask Miss Liu if provincial audiences are well behaved, hoping to hear a diatribe about twats with mobiles, but all I get is an affirmative grunt.

She gives me a line to sing: “Young lady / Thank you for your hospitality / Tiying is a gentleman / Please give him your consent” or something like that. I am able to memorise the line itself and the tune very fast, but once the band get involved there is a whole set of alien meters and pauses that interfere. Sometimes a line begins on the beat. Sometimes it begins half a beat behind it, seemingly at random. The band’s job in Chinese opera is to follow the singers, not the other way around, so a gaggle of musicians with pained expressions struggle to work out where I am going with my lyrics. I keep my eyes fixed on the lady who smacks the little harpy thing with hammers, because she is mouthing along with the words, and I can take a few cues from her.

It’s enough. We get something in the can, which we can stretch with a sarcastic voice-over. I am fighting impossible conditions, done up like Julian Clary in a pair of bathroom curtains, wailing what appears to be two different tunes at once, in Chinese, while two cameramen circle around me and a bunch of musicians make a noise like a piano falling down some stairs.

We chat to the band and Miss Liu introduces the musicians, including the man who plays the Luqin, a supposedly unique instrument in Shandong that looks like a cross between a lute and a mandolin. He hands it to me to twang, and I say to the camera. “I can’t actually play any instruments. You might as well give a computer to a monkey.”

And cut. That’s my last shot of the production. Although the crew are filming tomorrow morning at the Jinan fish market, I am done. Tomorrow, I can put on a clean, non-continuity shirt for the first time in two weeks, and wait for the evening train to Beijing.

There is no soap in the bathroom. I get as much of the make-up off as I can, but it’s difficult around the eyes.

“You’re less Julian Clary now,” says the director. “More Gary Numan.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Confucius: A Biography. These events occurred during the filming of Shandong: Land of Confucius (2018).

I don’t know what day it is. Last time I looked, it was Sunday, and now it isn’t. We are only a couple of days away from wrapping, but we have some tough things ahead, mainly in story terms as we try to work out where to fit them. Today is one such question mark, as we are obliged to somehow fill five minutes of screen time with a piece on Heze, a town known only for its peonies.

In the time of Confucius, this was the state of Cao, where Confucius had a run-in with local temple heavies who mistook him for a vagrant. But there’s nowhere really appropriate to talk about that, so we are standing in Zhao Xinyong’s shed. He grows flowers there. Then he sells them… it’s hardly fun TV.

“Do you do… anything else?” asks the director warily.

Mr Zhao explains that he plants the peony flowers, then they grow in the greenhouse… and then ten years later they turn out different or the same. Luckily, there is a statue on the grounds of the Peony Fairies from an old folk tale, so I am able to walk around explaining that the first two varieties of peony were born from the unexpected union of two fairies and two brothers from Luoyang. Mr Zhao explains to me how nervous he was when the government assessors turned up after a ten-year wait, and told him that he had indeed created a dozen new varieties of peony.

With time to fill – we need to somehow spend five minutes of the show in this city – we head down to the local business centre, where I ransack a display of peony-related products while making sarcastic comments to the camera.

“Ooh, peony tea, good for the prostate. Ooh, peony toothpaste, for people with flowery teeth. Here’s some peony morpholift emulsion. I’m often told that my morphs need lifting, so I will get some of that.”

I end up examining peony-based face masks, and deciding that the one that is “charmingly moist” is probably the best for me. It’ll do. Honour is served; we’ve managed to make a silk purse of the sow’s ear that is Heze, and it should be on to the next destination. Except we are delayed for thirty minutes while the Chinese director has a massive row with Jiuqing the producer in front of the whole crew, which ends with him yelling at her: “I don’t care what van you ride in. You can ride with the gear if you don’t hurry up.”

The problem, as best I can work out, is that we need to be in Taierzhuang tomorrow to film the sing-song girl. Ideally, we should be somewhere else doing something about Chinese opera, but the opera singer is only available the day after tomorrow, so we will have to drive for four hours to get there, and then two hours back the following day. It seems like such a minor issue, but we are only a couple of days away from finishing the shoot, and nerves are fraying.

Partly, this is my fault. The crew are shooting such a punishing schedule because I am only available for two weeks. This places huge pressure on Jiuqing to get everyone moved around the province in time, and it will mean we are further away from the bullet train station on the last day than we really ought to be. Telling Jiuqing to ride with the gear means she will have to spend four hours with the grips, also known as the Garlic Boys because they walk around with a sack of raw garlic to insulate their stomachs against dodgy food. You can imagine how they smell, or perhaps you can’t.

Nobody is impressed. Confucius said: “When you are poor, it is often hard to keep a smiling face. But when you are rich, it costs nothing to be polite.” Which is pretty much how I feel about the director. He will go on to apologise profusely over the next two days for being such an arse, but there was no real reason for him to shout so much at Jiuqing after she has put in so much hard work.

We reach the next location minutes after midnight. It seems to be a charming old town, festooned with red lanterns. But we are all too tired to look around us.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Confucius: A Biography. These events occurred during the filming of Shandong: Land of Confucius (2018).