Floyd - Floyds China

To Tess Floyd, and my ever-patient editor Barbara Dixon

It is a long haul from Heathrow to Beijing via Islamabad! And if you fly Pakistan International Airways, as I did, it is a very long, dry haul. There is, after all, only so much fruit juice you can drink and, of course, in common with all other airlines, you cannot smoke either, although I noticed, while I was on the flight deck with Captain Mian Naveed, his pipe was close at hand. I passed a couple of happy hours with him, a most amusing and philosophical gentleman.

I returned to my seat for dinner, served from a rickety old trolley, with wonderful dishes of Pakistani food dhal, lamb korma, saffron rice, spinach and cottage cheese, delicious food and when the steward noticed that I had, in fact, eaten everything including the bits of raw chilli in some of the dishes he said, You like Pakistani food?, Yup, I said, I sure do. Would you like some more? he said. You bet, I said, and had second helpings. Instead of my usual alcoholic digestif to follow, I had a refreshing cup of green tea. Beijing, here I come!

Wow! What a swept-up airport there is in Beijing. Six oclock in the morning and silence. Tick the boxes in my health immigration card. Pad gently through the long marble-floored corridors and climb gratefully into the limousine to take me to my hotel.

At the Crowne Plaza there is a reception committee. The general manager, the executive chef and several European acolytes are waiting to show me to my room. But, I dont want to go to my room. I want some breakfast! And, by the way, I would quite like a drink of the non-fruit juice kind.

In the dining rooms kitchen, behind the long counters, there is the smiling face of a chubby head chef and, further along, serene ladies are wrapping up dim sums, but what I want is congee. They have four different varieties of congee for breakfast. But for those of you who dont know what congee is, it is basically a porridge made from rice. Rice cooked in chicken stock. As simple as that, but by the time you have added pickled ginger, chillies, a couple of cooked prawns or some shredded chicken, you have a breakfast that can blast you into the stratosphere. After two bowls of congee, I returned to the buffet and my big, fat, smiling Chinese cook said, What would you like next? So, I chose some spicy chicken with black beans and a plate of freshly boiled noodles garnished with crispy deep-fried onions, some ginger and pickled cucumber. When I say pickled cucumber, this is simply cucumber that has been marinated in rice vinegar. I helped myself to a large spoon of fresh chilli sauce again very simple, chillies chopped up in oil. I was beginning to feel better after my nearly 48-hour journey (because I had overnighted in Islamabad), so I returned again to the buffet and got myself a plate of stir-fried pak choi, melon, green peppers and ginger. It was 7.30 a.m. but I noticed there was a Japanese section at the other end of this wonderful open kitchen, so I had a couple of bowls of clear chicken broth and some raw tuna fish with wasabi and pickled ginger. It was now 8.30 a.m. and, whereas time and tide wait for no man, it was time for a kip.

I took the lift to my room, switched on the television and, to my horror, Star Asia was showing Floyd on Fish, a programme I had made over 20 years ago. I opened the mini bar, selected a stiff one and went to sleep.

Refreshed, showered and altogether more up together, I discovered it was lunchtime. My chubby Chinese cook was still there, smiling, happy, and remembered me from breakfast. He had a crispy roast duck and carved it neatly for me, suggesting I take some steamed rice and pickles. And then, to my delight, when I wandered up to the bit where they have the puddings, there was a pot or dish of baked apple custard. Now, this surprised me, because I felt, or I thought I knew, the Chinese had no particular lactic cuisine, but was it good! And next to that were some very simple apple fritters sprinkled with cinnamon. God, I was feeling better!

My assistant, who comes unashamedly from Cumbria, chose the European option for lunch. Why do people travel thousands of miles to eat lasagne and chips that the Old Bull and Bush serves every lunchtime? I just got myself a few more fritters and waited to meet my photographer, who turned out to be an elegant, tall, Chinese-speaking German who had fallen in love with China many years before and now based her life and career in the Peoples Republic. She said she wanted to be called Kat. She was probably 30 and had proposed that our first shoot should be on the Great Wall of China. So, the following morning at 5.00 a.m. we set off in a little red car driven by Mr Jing to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. This particular entrance to the Great Wall is the most grotesque tourist-orientated place you can imagine. People hollering, T-shirts for sale, worse than Brighton Pier; and even after you have taken the cable car up to the first level, you still have the steps to climb, created presumably by some Mongolian or Chinese emperor, which are each about three feet high. I find myself having to climb the final steps on my hands and knees, I could not do it, and yet the Saga louts with their walking sticks and rucksacks were springing up like newborn monkeys. Believe you me, if anyone says take a trip to the Great Wall dont bother. It is reconstructed, of course, it is magnificent, but when you get knocked over by hoardes of Swedes, Americans, Germans, Japanese, etc., all clutching their T-shirts, the mystique somehow disappears. The only sane man that day was Mr Jing, who, when we arrived at the barrier of the car park, which would have forced me to have walked another 200 metres, refused to be kowtowed and said, I am taking Mr Floyd to the closest point possible! If you ever find yourself in Beijing (once know as, Peking and before that Ping Pong), call up Mr Jing. Without Mr Jing, life would be as for Bertie Wooster without Jeeves!

The morning had been cold, but now it was hot and overcast and in the hot wind it was snowing little puffballs of blossom as we bounced along in Mr Jings uncomfortable, hot, cramped car, smoking Mr Jings Chinese cigarettes. It had taken us three hours to get to the Great Wall instead of the estimated one hour. Jet lag and the early morning start were weighing heavily upon me as we headed back to Beijing. Mr Jing, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, was chattering away and, from time to time, poured some warm tea from a screw-top jam jar and handed it to me. Apparently all Beijing drivers carry endless quantities of tea in their cars and also endless packets of cigarettes, but then tea drinking is a cult in China. There are three kinds: fermented (red/black), unfermented (green) and semi-fermented (Oolong). Then there are the smoked teas, the scented teas and chrysanthemum tea. The flavours can vary enormously depending on which province the tea has been grown in and each has its own subtle fragrance. Tea is drunk all day and is considered good for just about anything that ails you; and by the way, its also still sold in bricks in China. But I digress. Anyway, we pulled over to the side of the road where there was a stall selling nuts and fruits and we were greeted, to my surprise, by a diminutive, elderly lady in a brightly coloured frock who led us across the road, chattering comfortably with Mr Jing and with the photographer, and into her one-storey, brick-built, shabby little bungalow. The garden had a rudimentary chicken coop and there were stacks of dried maize stalks, piles of nappa cabbage and a few tomatoes, but it was neglected and somehow rather sad. We went into the cool, gloomy house, illuminated by two flickering lightbulbs without shades, one in the kitchen and one in the other room. To the left and right of the kitchen door were two stone-built rectangles, each one containing an iron built-in dish about three feet in diameter. These were wood-fired, or maize stalk-fired, woks, that indispensable cooking utensil in China. We went into the other room, which had two chairs, a large built-in wooden bed about eight feet long, a bucket of water, a small table and shabby walls covered with garish photographs of Chairman Mao. Mrs Lis husband (Mr Yang) sat, serene but smiling in his blue overalls. He was probably seventy. I didnt know what was going on and I know not to ask. When something good happens, let it happen. There were three or four ladies in the cramped room and in a battered aluminium bowl they mixed flour and water into a dough, rolled it out very thinly and then cut it deftly into circles about three inches in diameter. Meanwhile, the old man, bent, slowly collected maize stalks from the garden and lit a fire under one of the huge woks. While he did this, the ladies chopped wild, green vegetables for which I have no translation perhaps wild spinach or lovage, and other herbs; they added a little rice vinegar to this mixture and deftly, so deftly, rolled them into balls the size of a marble, folded them into the little rounds of dough and formed them into crescent shapes. After the smoke had settled, the water in the wok began to boil and one by one they dropped these wonderful dumplings into the water. After ten or fifteen minutes they were cooked and we all sat upon this built-in bed with a narrow plank of wood on stubby legs between us and ate these amazing dumplings.