But the contrast was astonishingly harmonious. The old city, huddling down against the ground, looked like undergrowth, with the skyscrapers sprouting up through it. The low, far-from-modern buildings were not in the least ashamed of their appearance—on the contrary, they actually seemed to take pride in the glittering modern structures rising up from among them.

I involuntarily recalled the vociferous protest campaigns that had raged in St Petersburg when there were plans to construct a skyscraper there. All that hysterical howling about the destruction of the cultural environment, the disfigurement of the glorious line of the horizon, the possibility that unique seventeenth-century ruins, or even the camps of primeval human beings, might be buried under the skyscraper . . .

Yes, of course the mentality in St Petersburg is special, cultivated on the swamps by the damp, piercing wind. But I would quite happily have sent all the protesters to live for a month or two in an old Petersburg communal apartment block, with moldy walls and narrow little windows. And then I would have asked them to vote on whether it was necessary and possible to erect modern buildings in an old city.

After all, love of one’s country doesn’t simply mean that you want to preserve as many tottering old ruins as possible. Otherwise the whole of North America would live in Indian wigwams and the log huts of the first settlers; London would consist entirely of the Victorian and Edwardian buildings so dear to the heart of the tourist, but not so very comfortable on the inside; and as for Africa and Asia—well, enough said . . .

I looked at the soaring skyscrapers and thought that I was beginning to understand the Chinese a little bit better. The ones living on the mainland and the ones on this island.

And I even envied them a little.

I opened my suitcase, took out some clean underclothes, and walked into the bathroom. Everything was very stylish. There was even a little television set standing on a shelf beside the sink. An expensive business: all these televisions for bathrooms require insulation against damp and they cost big money. I once wanted to put one like that in our bathroom at home, to watch the news while I was getting washed, shaving, and brushing my teeth, but the price put me right off the idea.

I picked up the television—it was absolutely tiny, only twelve inches wide. I could easily lift it with one hand. I turned it round.

At the back I saw microcircuits glittering behind the holes in a standard plastic cover. How come? The guests get washed, splash water about, take hot showers, fill the bathroom with clouds of steam—and there’s a TV set standing here, with no insulation? It’ll blow a circuit! It might last a year, but that circuit will still blow! Why hadn’t they put in an expensive one, a proper one?