I’d been wrong about the airport. The serious talk was waiting for us at the hotel.

We took adjacent rooms. (Arina had enough delicacy not to suggest moving in together.) I looked over my room and stood for a minute at the immense French window that covered an entire wall, gazing out at Taipei as it was flooded by the lights of evening. The sight was astounding. And not at all because of the skyscrapers, although right in front of the hotel there was one that simultaneously resembled a Chinese pagoda and some exotic fruit, thrusting its pinnacle up into the sky. There are bigger skyscrapers in New York, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

The astounding thing here was the contrast. Taipei was not such a very tall city: on all sides there were entire neighborhoods of buildings no more than three or four stories high. The isolated high-rise structures should have looked alien here.

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.