The open air markets were like medieval street scenes: animals being hacked up on long wooden tables with huge bloodied choppers, bone and fur and flesh everywhere. Westerners were an irresistible curiosity. Almost nobody had a television set, and the country had been closed to the outside world for decades. And if I thought the Chinese were strange, they thought I was even stranger. There I was, six foot-two, blond hair, ginger beard, a completely alien sight on the streets of China. And huge crowds of people simply followed me around, staring open-mouthed.

I had an extraordinary sense of having arrived somewhere special, a society preserved as in aspic, and I knew immediately that I wanted to write about it.

I went away and spent the next eight years reading everything I could about the country—its history, its politics, its culture, its cuisine—and watched with the rest of the world as the horrors of Tiananmen Square unravelled before me on my television screen in 1989.

In 1991 I returned, this time in search of a story. I went to Beijing on a tourist visa, but spent my days and nights exploring the city, talking to people, getting a sense of the place. Although the new, modern Beijing, under Deng Xiaoping, was already springing up around me, it still felt hugely alien. No one spoke English. Street signs, menus, shop names, maps, everything was written in Chinese characters. Even the Pinyin romanisation of Chinese was rare.

At that time they had built six ring roads around the city, all of which were eerily empty. Vast bike lanes flowed with a stream of blue-suited, black-haired humanity, and people still gawped at us everywhere we went.

I befriended a tour guide who was eager to talk to me about the events in Tiananmen Square two years before. One night he took us to his home at the end of a line of squat, concrete pillboxes in a dark, unlit alley. He, his wife, their baby, and their babysitter (a peasant girl from the country) lived in one tiny room that contained two beds, a table, a couple of armchairs and a huge television set. The kitchen was a concrete cubicle barely big enough to turn around in. An outside toilet was shared with the other residents of the block.

He showed us illicit video taken during the Tiananmen Square protests, and warned us to be careful when we left, because the Street Committee would be watching us. We rode back through the city well after midnight in an almost empty bus, the only other passengers on it with their eyes fixed on us.