We flew to the provincial capital, Guiyang, where we were met by Heidi’s mother, brother, and a neighbour who had kindly offered to drive us the hour and a half to their home town of Zunyi. The drive took us along yet more expressways; the weather was cloudy with little to give a clue about the characteristics of the landscape. Then, with no warning, we pulled off the expressway – we had arrived in Zunyi. According to Lonely Planet, Zunyi was a town with a population of around 800,000, famous for being the place where Mao Zedong took control of the Communist Party before embarking on the Long March across the country. That had been the first step before he led the Party to victory in the civil war and eventually took control of the whole country. Aside from that one meeting site, Zunyi did not seem to have much else to get excited about.

I had noticed that I was the only westerner on the plane and probably also in Guiyang airport; I can tell you I was certainly the only foreigner that I saw in Zunyi on that first night. I cannot imagine that too many laowai made it to Zunyi, and from some of the expressions that I saw on the people around me, I do not think too many expected to see them. The neighbour pulled the car up in the middle of a complex of apartment tenements, dark, forbidding buildings with many an iron bar across the windows and narrow concrete spaces between the towers. The original plan had been for Heidi and me to stay in a hotel, but her mother had overruled this, insisting that it was a time for family and that we stay in her apartment with her. As I walked up to her fourth-floor apartment, the concrete steps of the apartment block in darkness as the bare light bulb above failed to click on, I started to wonder what I had let myself in for. We were there for five days.