“Both my parents were sent to labour camps. They had been denounced as ‘rightists.’ They were educated, you see. My mother died there, and my father was a broken man. My Uncle Yifu was a policeman in Beijing. He was denounced and spent three years in prison.”

Margaret was stunned. “I had no idea. I really had no idea.”

She thought of all the Chinese she had met since her arrival. Every one of them had lived through the Cultural Revolution. Some of them would have been Red Guards, others their victims. Now, it seemed, they lived and worked together as if nothing had happened. “How do people do that?” she said. “I mean, live with each other again. Red Guards, and the people they persecuted.” A society riddled with the forces of guilt and revenge.

Li shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seemed natural. Like being better after being ill. You just got on with your life. People didn’t talk much about it at the time. They do now, if you ask. For many people being a Red Guard was the most exciting time of their lives. They travelled all over the country. They didn’t have to pay for their train fares or their food. People were scared of them. They had power.

“You know, maybe like old soldiers remembering a war, no matter whether it had been good or bad for them, the experience was so heightened, everything in their lives after it seems dull.”

“And their victims?”

“When the war ends you don’t go on fighting,” Li said. “You get on with the peace.”

Margaret was not convinced she could have been so philosophical. “What happened to Mei Yuan?”

“She was sent to a labour camp in Hunan where she was forced to work in the fields along with the peasants. But in some ways she was lucky.”

“Lucky!”

“Her husband was sent to the same camp. They were not separated like so many others.” His face clouded. She saw it immediately.

“What?”

He shrugged. “In other ways she was not so lucky.” There was a catch in his voice. “Their baby boy was taken away from them. She never saw him again.”

A towering marble statue of Chairman Mao in greatcoat and peaked cap stood just inside the gate of the Ministry of Agriculture on Hepinglidong Street, an arm outstretched in welcome. The Ministry, set in its sprawling, leafy compound, was housed in a huge concrete edifice behind stone-pillared gates. A stone-faced guard stood outside, glowering at a crowd of several dozen schoolchildren and their teachers, who had set up a long table on the sidewalk. A strip of white linen ran its length, and the children were trying to persuade passers-by to sign it in support of some conservation issue.