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I was kind of right and very wrong. I was there with thousands of tourists and all of them Chinese; but tourists they were. How could I have imagined otherwise? Tourists snapping each other and giggling and fiddling with their sunglasses and tapping at their mobiles and fussing over their (single) children, while more uncertainly in their midst faltered venerable old couples. I watched one old man in his crumpled Mao suit and cap squinting into the sun at the distant summit of the Pearl Television Tower, tears in his eyes, tears perhaps only of rheumy senility. Or what else?

Back to the Bund; this time we go under the river and my taxi driver is a woman, her cab as touchingly pristine as a Northern parlour; doilies, antimacassars, plastic flowers. As I sit reflecting on the inherently greater finesse of women she too reaches down by the gear lever and quaffs from her jar of primordial broth. What is this stuff?

In the backstreet of motorcycle workshops I am intrigued at a crowd at the entrance of a bare dark interior, like a disused bus depot. In the darkness I find a bank of screens surrounded by tiers of seats. A becharmed audience watches in the penumbra the fluctuant twinklings of a thousand share prices. Greed is good. To be rich is glorious. As Gordon Gekko and Deng Shiao Ping agreed, respectively, in the eighties.

Back in the street I see my second woman driver of the day. She is about eighteen and nursing a great black limousine out into the lane. The glossy paintwork reflects the fresh roses and silver bells taped to the hood.

I stop at a little shop and buy a cute padded miniskirt for a friend and from an antique shop a little stack of bronze turtles for my son.

All visitors out to the airport pass beneath a famous and forbidding hoarding that straddles the expressway. It says (gold letter on red, of course):

DEVELOPMENT IS THE IRREFUTABLE ARGUMENT.

I like this; its unashamed espousal of development; the abstractness of its wording. The fact that it blithely ignores the fact that in some cultures people can and do refute development. But rather this than the coquettish, self-congratulatory little-me-ishness of a sigh on a rural by-pass:

Camshire County Council. Building Roads for You.

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