Ah Lei was neither dragon nor steed; he was less than half my size. I thought he would be crushed by my luggage but he hoisted it all on his back with a couple of flicks of his wrist. ‘What-place wanchi?’ says he to me, and I tell him: ‘Markwick’s Hotel’. And so, following my young Atlas, I stepped upon the stretch of shore that forms the heart and hearth of Fanqui-town. This is an open space between the factories and the river-bank: the English speak of it as ‘The Square’, but Hindusthanis have a better name for it. They call it the ‘Maidan’ which is exactly what it is, a crossroads, a meeting-place, a piazza, a promenade, a stage for a tamasha that never ends: it is a scene of such activity, such animation, that I despair of being able to capture it on canvas. Everywhere you look there is something utterly strange and ever so singular: a storm of chirruping approaches you, and at its centre is a man with thousands of walnut-shells hanging from shoulder-poles; on closer inspection you discover that each walnut has been carved into an exquisite cage – for a cricket! The man is carrying thousands of these insects and they are all in full song. You have not taken more than a step or two before another tempest of noise approaches you, at a trot; at the centre of it is a grand personage, perhaps a Mandarin or a merchant of the Co-Hong guild; he is seated in a kind of palki, except that it is actually a curtained sedan chair, suspended from shoulder-poles; the men who carry the chair are called ‘horses without tails’ and they have attendants running alongside, beating drums and clappers to clear the way. It is all so new that you stare too long and are almost trampled underfoot by the tail-less stallions …

And yet it is a tiny place! All of Fanqui-town – the Maidan, the streets and all thirteen factories – would fit into a small corner of the Maidan in Calcutta. From end to end the enclave is only about a thousand feet in length, less than a quarter of a mile, and in width it is about half that. In a way Fanqui-town is like a ship at sea, with hundreds – no, thousands – of men living crammed together in a little sliver of a space. I do believe there is no place like it on earth, so small and yet so varied, where people from the far corners of the earth must live, elbow to elbow, for six months of the year. I tell you, Pugglissima mia, were you to stand in the Maidan and look at the flags of the factories, fluttering against the grey walls of Canton’s citadel, I am certain you too would be overcome: it is as if you had arrived at the threshold of the last and greatest of all the world’s caravanserais.

And yet, in a way, it is also so familiar: Everywhere you look there are khidmatgars, daftardars, khansamas, chuprassies, peons, durwans, khazanadars, khalasis and lascars. And this, my dear Puggly, is one of the greatest of the many surprises of Fanqui-town – a great number of its denizens are from India! They come from Sindh and Goa, Bombay and Malabar, Madras and the Coringa hills, Calcutta and Sylhet – but these differences mean nothing to the gamins who swarm around the Maidan. They have their own names for every variety of foreign devil: the British are ‘I-says’ and the French are ‘Merdes’. The Hindusthanis are by the same token, ‘Achhas’: no matter whether a man is from Karachi or Chittagong, the lads will swarm after him, with their hands outstretched, shouting: ‘Achha! Achha! Gimme cumshaw!’