When I was a boy, grandpa would pat my head, point to the distant, winding mountains and tell me about the locomotives that used to tunnel beneath them en route to the village docks. Loaded down with gold and copper ore from nearby mines and emitting puffs of white smoke, the trains brought their cargo to the great ships that lay at anchor – waiting, grandpa said, to ferry our national treasure to the far corners of their wretched, god-damned British Empire. He claimed that the belching smokestacks of the British steamers towered so high that seabirds, unfamiliar with the foreign craft, would often fly right into them and smash their skulls in.

There was integrity in the way those birds died, grandpa said. A moral for the Chinese people.