In a tiny hamlet outside the city of Huayin, I sat on the floor of a dusty brick shack. It belonged to a family of farmers who seemed to have been vaulted from the distant past into the twenty-first century. The soil still yielded ancient stones from buildings that had stood there millennia before, part of the great riparian civilisation that had grown up beside the Yellow River. An old woman called Qin Yu Lan, who was bird-thin and bowed from a lifetime of hard graft, cooked a meatless dinner over handfuls of blazing firewood and wept about her son’s failure to find a wife. He was forty, and she was lamenting the lonely old age that faced him. She might well have been shedding tears for her own predicament. She had lived her life like an ox in harness, dragging unimaginable burdens, and there was no possibility of respite in old age, no daughter-in-law to share her labour, to care for her or her decrepit husband. Now and again a train rumbled along the track behind the house. The old terraces above us were overgrown with thornbushes and wild date trees. Forty years earlier, there had been wolves roaming in the woods. Now this was the last bit of village left as the urban sprawl encroached.

Mrs Qin’s plight touched a chord with my belated understanding that I had arrived in a world wholly shaped by the decisions of previous generations. She and I were part of a species that was living through the reverberations of a slow-motion car crash that had begun in the long nineteenth century. The filthy air we breathed, the fictional division of the globe into nations, planes, penicillin, dentistry, the plastic detritus in the grass by the outside toilet: all were products of this sudden period of change; something that, for want of a better word, we must be tempted to call modernity.