Fortunately, the ferry from Yantai had provided a free bus to Dalian Station. This removed one stage of the evening’s transport arrangements, leaving me to reach the hotel and discover the best bed I had slept in for quite a while.
There were more colonies to inspect. They could wait until morning.
Dalian had been developed around the ambitions of two empires. Russia wanted a port connected to its great railway system across Asia. Japan inherited the Russian position after the war and built upon it with considerable confidence. Both left architecture which suggested that they expected to remain.
My ankle imposed a more modest timetable.
The following day I did not walk far, but I reached Russian Street. A few amazing buildings survived. Unfortunately, the street around them had been turned into a sad theme park.
There is a difference between preserving an old quarter and converting it into an attraction. The buildings may remain while the atmosphere which made them worth visiting disappears.
Hotel 1896 did the best job. Elsewhere, I found myself trying to separate the surviving Russian city from the presentation laid over it. The architecture deserved better than its surroundings.
The civic centre was more impressive. Grand Japanese-era bank buildings stood with the confidence of institutions which had not expected to become historical curiosities. Art Deco was part of the architectural language, but the more striking quality was permanence.
These were not the buildings of men planning to pack up the following season. They had established a city and built as though its future belonged to them.
History had other arrangements.
I had noodles near the hotel and returned to the excellent bed. The first day’s inspection had been limited, but Dalian had already justified the crossing.
The next morning I was up early for Port Arthur.
Lüshun deserves its own post. The forts, harbour, Japanese monuments and Russian railway remains made it far more than a day trip from Dalian. I returned exhausted, had evening noodles again and went back to bed.
The colonies were proving easier to inspect than to walk through.
On the final day I went to Nanshan, where the Japanese quarter presented much the same problem as Russian Street. Another sad theme park, with most of the restaurants closed down. Whatever the intended effect, a street of closed restaurants does not convey much life.
The better discoveries were off the main streets. Beautiful Japanese Art Deco remained, away from the part which had been arranged for visitors. As in Shanghai, the surviving city became more interesting once I stepped away from its designated presentation.
I also found a lovely Chinese park and sat in the sun.
For a while, there was nothing to inspect. Just a place to sit, some sunshine and an ankle which appreciated the interruption.
Then I went to Venice.
I had not expected to include it in a single day’s exploration of Dalian, but the city had supplied a kitschy version of Italy alongside its Russian and Japanese remains.
Venice was at least straightforward about being an imitation. It had not lost an earlier life in the process of becoming a tourist attraction. The attraction was the whole point.
Japan, China and Venice in a day. Quite an itinerary for a man who had arrived limping.
Back at the hotel, I collected my luggage and successfully left behind my power bank, pen and Hugo Boss T-shirt.
Never mind.
The next stage was an overnight train north to Harbin, following the old imperial railway corridor. For the Russians, it had been a connection into the Trans-Siberian system. For the Japanese, it became the route of the Asia Express.
It depended which empire we were talking about. Tonight, China was providing the sleeper.
Then Dalian supplied one final discovery.
After settling into my carriage, I looked out and spotted the old Russian railway station, tucked away in the far corner of the modern station complex.
There it was.
After the tourist streets, the closed restaurants and the imported Venice, an original piece of the Russian city had appeared beside the railway which explained why it had been built.
I had spent part of the day walking through imitation.
Lüshun was somewhere I had wanted to visit for years.
I first discovered it as Port Arthur while reading about the Russo-Japanese War: a conflict almost forgotten in Britain and much of Europe, but certainly not forgotten here, in Japan or in Moscow.
The war announced the arrival of Japan as a modern great power. Much of the world expected Russia to win. Russia was a vast European empire with seemingly limitless reserves of men. Japan had emerged from feudal isolation only a few decades earlier.
Japan went for it and won.
At the centre of the struggle was one of the finest natural harbours in northern China. The Qing government had begun developing Port Arthur as a naval base in the nineteenth century. Russia leased it in 1898, expanded the harbour and fortifications, and connected it to the Chinese Eastern Railway and the wider Trans-Siberian system.
Then Japan attacked.
The siege of Port Arthur anticipated the industrial slaughter of the First World War. Trenches, concrete forts, barbed wire, machine guns, mines and heavy artillery turned hills into killing grounds. Infantrymen were repeatedly sent against positions designed to destroy them.
The figures vary, but the scale does not. The Japanese Third Army suffered about 58,000 battle casualties during the siege, while roughly 34,000 more men became sick. Russian land casualties ran above 30,000, and tens of thousands of survivors entered captivity when the fortress surrendered in January 1905.
It was victory by industrial attrition.
More than a century later, I arrived at Lüshun station and immediately knew that I had entered minor tourist territory. A man intercepted me outside and began trying to sell me a taxi tour.
I declined.
It must be getting difficult for the traditional guides. A foreign visitor can now arrive in an unfamiliar Chinese town having already used artificial intelligence to identify every site, place them in order and obtain their Chinese names. A taxi-hailing application will then summon a private driver directly to the pavement.
Mine carried me to the East Jiguanshan battlefield for 9.5 yuan.
The visitor centre had a large car park, so the place must become busy at certain times of year. On that particular day, beautifully, it was almost empty. I bought my ticket and walked uphill towards the North Fort, one of the positions around which the final destruction of the Russian defence took place.
The Chinese have done a good job of maintaining the site without polishing the life out of it. Essential work has been completed, paths made safe and several Russian guns preserved. Yet much of the fort has simply been left where the battle abandoned it, slowly ageing on the hillside.
That is as it should be.
The concrete remains pocked with bullet and shell damage. Underground passages lead into ruined chambers. The Japanese mined their way through the defences and blew open a breach before forcing an entrance. Walking through the place where they broke in, with almost nobody else present, conveyed more than another immaculate military museum ever could.
The most sombre point was the casemate where a Japanese 280-millimetre howitzer shell made a direct hit on 15 December 1904. General Roman Kondratenko, regarded as the heart of the Russian defence, was killed there with members of his staff. Port Arthur surrendered eighteen days later.
The Japanese later erected a granite monument at the place where he died.
It is still standing.
I was also surprised to find that the main Japanese war monument within the fort was still standing and appeared to be well maintained.
That surprised me. China and Japan do not enjoy the easiest historical relationship, and I have repeatedly noticed that Japanese buildings in China tend to meet a more brutal fate than Russian or European ones. Yet here the Chinese had retained not only the Russian fort, but the monuments erected by the Japanese victors—including their memorial to a respected Russian enemy.
Most of the time I wandered alone. I encountered one small group of Russians who had evidently come to inspect their own country’s imperial remains. They were the first white people I had seen for several days. Then they moved on and the fort became quiet again.
The sun appeared briefly. From the high ground, the military logic of the place became obvious. Russia had invested heavily in these forts because they commanded the approaches to a superb harbour. The height, the field of view and the complexity of the defensive system turned the landscape itself into a weapon.
I had intended to continue up to the Wangtai Battery. Unfortunately, an injured ankle made the climb unwise, and the courtesy buses did not appear to be operating. I therefore summoned another private driver for the princely sum of about ten yuan and continued into central Lüshun.
The ordinary streets contained another layer of the old Japanese city. Houses from the 1920s and 1930s were still being used, but not appreciated. They remained recognisable beneath later additions, neglect and decay. I did not photograph them. They were not exhibits. They were simply old buildings being consumed by ordinary life.
The grander Japanese architecture had fared better. Several Art Deco buildings remained around the centre, including former Japanese banks which had become Chinese banks. Empires departed. Banking survived.
I bought some lunch and sat in the square. Two Chinese women approached and began a conversation through translation applications. One told me that she was sixty-five. Her friend appeared to be about the same age.
They asked where I was from.
Then they asked my age.
Then whether I had ever been married.
Then whether I had children.
At first I assumed that this was ordinary curiosity. By the time they asked whether I would like to marry again, I realised that I was being assessed.
Chinese marriage markets are famously direct. Years of the one-child policy concentrated the future of many families into a single son or daughter, watched by two parents and four grandparents. Public matchmaking became family business. Age, education, property, occupation and income are not treated as mysterious matters to be discovered after six months of courtship. They are market information.
The women informed me that they could find me a good Chinese woman.
Then came the decisive question.
What was my monthly income?
My God. I had been placed on the Lüshun matchmaking circuit.
It was one of the few times in my life that I had encountered women who stated the market mechanism openly instead of hiding its terms behind words such as “romance”, “love” and “security”. In this respect, China is light years ahead of the West, where men have yet to wake up to the truth.
I had learned long ago that when women began asking about a man’s income and assets, it was never a good move for the man.
By now the conversation had become hilarious because it was proceeding exactly like the Chinese marriage-market videos I had watched before the trip. The only sensible course was to destroy my own valuation before somebody produced a suitable candidate.
I explained that five children had been expensive. So had the divorce. I had also just quit my job.
“Oh. What a shame.”
Their interest evaporated. Fortunately, I had finished my lunch. We smiled, I thanked them for the conversation, and I left the market with my freedom intact.
There was one more imperial monument to inspect.
Another private driver carried me up Baiyu Mountain to the great Japanese tower overlooking the harbour. Originally called the Tower in Honour of Loyalty, it was completed in 1909 to commemorate the Japanese dead of the siege.
It is an extraordinary imperial structure: 66.8 metres of stone, concrete, columns and calculated vertical power. Like so many imperial monuments, it reaches backwards into the architectural language of Greece and Rome while proclaiming the arrival of something aggressively modern.
The official explanation is that the tower resembles a memorial candle, with its pointed summit modelled on a 280-millimetre howitzer shell. Perhaps. The distinctly phallic alternative hardly requires a trained eye. Victorious empires do not normally choose their vertical symbols by accident.
Whatever its symbolism, the monument is magnificent. So is the view. From the summit, the harbour, naval base and surrounding coastline are laid out below. The strategic importance of Lüshun becomes undeniable. It controls a superb natural port near the approaches to the Bohai Sea, with the Korean peninsula and Japan beyond. The flags have changed, but the geography has not. The Chinese Navy has every reason to value the position as highly as the Russians and Japanese did.
Again, I was amazed that the tower had survived. A large fortress-like Japanese building beside it had not been treated so well. Its entrances had been bricked up and the structure was being left to decay. The monument remained dominant over the town while part of the complex beside it quietly rotted away.
I ordered another private driver for the descent and entered what I believed was the local railway station as my destination.
It was the wrong station.
This proved to be the best navigational error of the day.
The car deposited me at the old Lüshun railway station, a beautiful Russian-style building of yellow walls, white timbering, green roofs and a domed tower. Passenger services ended in 2014, but the building has been restored and remains one of the finest surviving stations of the old imperial railway system.
Lüshun was the southern terminus of the Russian-built branch of the Chinese Eastern Railway, connected northwards into the Trans-Siberian network. The line joined the port directly to the machinery of Russian expansion across Asia.
Then I noticed a much smaller boarded wooden building on the opposite side. I assumed that it had been a temporary shop from the period when the grand station was built. Its survival seemed extraordinary amid the high-rise apartments surrounding it.
The truth was even better.
That modest building appears to have been the original Russian station, opened when the railway reached Lüshun in 1903 and later used by the railway police. The elegant station opposite was begun from a Russian design but completed under Japanese rule after the war.
The temporary building was the original. The building which looked perfectly Russian had been finished by Japan. Lüshun had compressed the transfer of empire into two structures facing one another across a road.
I had meant to find the railway station. By selecting the wrong one, I had found both.
After a few photographs, I summoned one final private driver to the correct modern station and took the metro back to central Dalian.
I returned to the hotel exhausted and deeply contented. Lüshun had existed in my mind for years as a place in history books: Port Arthur, the great siege, the moment Japan announced itself and the industrial battlefield which warned Europe what was coming.
Now I had walked through the breach, stood where Kondratenko died, looked down upon the harbour, been assessed by the local matchmakers and discovered the remains of two empires because I entered the wrong destination.
I watched Europe discuss its trade deficit with China. Then I went to Yantai Port and saw the answer.
This morning, before leaving my hotel in Yantai, I watched Euronews discussing the latest round of trade talks between China and the European Union.
The central figure was almost too large to absorb.
In 2025, the European Union imported €559.4 billion of goods from China and exported €199.6 billion in return. The deficit was €359.8 billion.
Almost one billion euros a day.
The discussion was about what China might concede, what Europe might restrict and how the relationship could be “rebalanced”. There was talk of subsidies, market access and unfair competition. All of these may form part of the calculation.
But nobody appeared willing to ask the more dangerous question.
What has Europe done to its own ability to produce?
The Cost of Making Things
Europe has spent years making reliable energy expensive.
Germany closed its last nuclear power stations. Coal was burdened before dependable replacements were ready. Cheap Russian gas disappeared. Taxes, carbon costs, regulation and political indecision accumulated on top of one another. The result is not theoretical. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity for energy-intensive industry in the European Union cost more than 50 per cent more than in China in 2025.
Then Europe expresses surprise when energy-intensive production moves elsewhere.
China is not sentimental about the energy required to run a civilisation. It burns coal, builds nuclear power stations, dams rivers, covers enormous areas with solar panels and erects wind turbines at scale. The energy source may change. The governing principle does not.
The power must exist.
Europe increasingly treats energy as a moral performance. China treats it as an industrial input.
The same difference appears in labour.
Europe has made work expensive and non-participation viable. It pays people to be useless, sometimes for generations.
At the same time, it imports large numbers of people from dubious countries without regard to intelligence, usefulness or cultural fit. Many become useless drains on the society that admitted them, consuming more in welfare, housing, healthcare, policing and public services than they produce in tax or useful work. That is not labour supply. It is parasitic immigration.
Europe taxes the productive economy twice: first to support non-contribution, and again to absorb the damage produced by bad selection.
Several Chinese people I spoke to were genuinely baffled by this.
“Why are you doing this?” they asked. “We would never accept it.”
They were not presenting an elaborate political theory. They simply could not understand why a civilisation would penalise the industries and people that sustain it while subsidising those who do not.
It is a fair question.
At Yantai Port
Then I switched off the television and went to the port.
The answer was waiting there in steel.
Yantai Port was full of ships: cargo vessels, ferries and working craft of every size. Cranes moved above them. Goods were being loaded, passengers processed and routes maintained across the Bohai Sea and beyond.
This was commerce. Not commerce as a paragraph in an EU communiqué. Not commerce as a political slogan. Goods, machinery, labour and capital were physically moving.
Yet the great ships were only half the scene. Along the water were smaller oyster and shellfish beds, tended by ordinary people operating at an entirely different scale.
The port contained both ends of a functioning economy: immense industrial capacity and small productive enterprise sharing the same stretch of water.
The sea was not scenery. It was working.
A Cabin to Dalian
My own place in this machinery was a first-class private cabin on the ferry to Dalian.
It was clean, comfortable and mine for the six-hour crossing. I could close the door, lie down and sleep while the ship carried me across the water. The equivalent in Europe would either not exist or would be priced at a level I would refuse to pay.
China is not frictionless. The procedures can be opaque. The ticketing can be peculiar. Translation can become an expedition of its own. The efficiency is not always polished.
But it works.
When a practical problem appears, somebody usually tries to solve it. The passenger is moved, the cargo is loaded and the ship leaves. The Chinese system can be clumsy at the edges and formidable at the centre.
Europe has become increasingly skilled at the opposite: polished presentation surrounding declining capacity.
The Wrong Negotiation
China certainly supports its industries. It protects parts of its market, directs credit, builds infrastructure and uses the power of the state to advance national production. Europe may reasonably respond to those things.
But they are not the whole explanation.
A subsidy cannot load a ship. A tariff cannot manufacture competence. Political protection cannot substitute indefinitely for abundant energy, trained labour, functioning ports, industrial scale and a culture which still expects systems to produce a result.
Europe wants China to buy more European goods while steadily making European goods harder and more expensive to produce. It wants Chinese prices without Chinese scale, Chinese infrastructure or Chinese seriousness. It wants the output while rejecting many of the inputs.
So the officials fly to Beijing and ask China to rebalance the result.
The imbalance was also made in Europe.
Tariffs may slow the ships. Regulations may obstruct their cargo. Trade negotiations may purchase time. None of them will make energy cheaper, rebuild a closed factory or turn subsidised non-participation into productive work.
By evening, this ferry will reach Dalian. Six hours across the water, with a private cabin in which I can sleep. Beyond the port waits the Russian and Japanese history of the city. Behind me, Yantai will continue loading ships and tending shellfish beds.
Brussels will continue talking about China.
The real question is not why China sells so much to Europe. It is why Europe chose to make itself so expensive, so administratively heavy and so tolerant of non-contribution that buying from China became the rational decision.
The deficit is not merely something China did to Europe.
It is the invoice Europe writes to itself one billion Euros at a time.
I came to China expecting bullet trains, smart factories and the remains of old empires. I did not expect to find Europe’s drinks cabinet waiting for me.
Everyone else had left the cellar when the woman came over with a single glass of red wine.
“Please taste our best red wine,” she said. “This is the one that won the awards.”
The Chinese visitors had gone. I was the only person left. She had not poured it for the group. She poured it for me.
It was excellent.
Perhaps she had watched me tasting the earlier wines and decided I knew what I was doing. I had taken a wine course once. One of my best investments in choosing wines appropriate to the food. Or perhaps Changyu’s marketing department had simply identified an open flank.
That should have been the end of the tasting. It was not.
Later, I discovered that my entrance ticket included another tasting in the 1892 House. I had not expected a second tasting at all. More glasses appeared, properly arranged, with small snacks between the wines to clear the palate. The whole thing was controlled, informed and generous.
I had never been treated to a wine experience like it in Europe.
This was becoming a pattern. Alcohol was one of the discoveries of China that I had never expected to make.
At the Source
Modern Qingdao was a German creation. The Germans planned and built the port, streets, railway, sewers and public buildings of the new city. Among what they built was the brewery founded in 1903, which remains there today.
I knew about that German brewing inheritance before arriving. It was part of the reason for going.
What I had not expected was how good the beer would taste.
Tsingtao sold in Britain is still brewed in Qingdao rather than produced under licence. But a beer shipped halfway around the world cannot arrive with the same freshness as one drunk at its source. Time, storage, temperature and transport all intervene. There is also more than one Tsingtao. At the original 1903 brewery I could taste different versions beside each other rather than treating the name as though it described one uniform industrial liquid.
The beer was clean, fresh and alive. It tasted better there because it belonged there.
Rule 1 of Travel photos failed, take the photo before beginning enjoying yourself
That distinction matters. Modern alcohol companies teach consumers to recognise a label. Older drinking cultures recognised a product, a place and a method. The name was evidence of origin rather than a substitute for it.
Qingdao had preserved both.
A Polish Brewer in Russian Harbin
Then came Harbin.
The Harbin brewery predates Tsingtao. It was founded in 1900 by Jan Wróblewski, a Polish entrepreneur from the Russian Empire, while Harbin was being built as a Russian imperial railway city on the Chinese Eastern Railway, connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Harbin 1900 describes itself on the label as a 100 per cent pure malt lager. That is an excellent claim. Malt is the traditional foundation of beer, before modern mass producers discovered the cheaper ingredients with which part of it could be replaced.
More than a century later, the beer still carries the history of the city that produced it.
The history was becoming unusually neat. German and British capital had established the brewery in the German-built city of Qingdao. A Pole from the Russian Empire had established the brewery in Russian imperial Harbin. China had taken the knowledge, absorbed the machinery and kept the beer.
The foreign presence receded. The breweries remained.
Wine Country
Yantai was the greater surprise.
I had not known that I was travelling into the centre of Chinese wine production. Qingdao is not far away, yet Yantai’s position on the northern side of the Shandong Peninsula gives it a different coastal climate and a serious wine industry.
Changyu was founded there in 1892 by Zhang Bishi, who brought in European vines and an Austro-Hungarian winemaker. It went on to produce China’s first industrially made wine and later its first brandy. That is enough history to understand the point: this was not an invented crest pasted onto a bottle last Tuesday.
The cellar was old, cool and convincing. The barrels and brickwork were real. So were the modern displays and the technology built around them. China had not turned the place into a mausoleum. It had kept the history working.
This was where the woman had singled me out after the scheduled tasting and brought over the award-winning red. It was not another sample left on the table. It was not part of the tasting flight. It was a separate glass of their best wine, poured for me after everyone else had gone.
The history mattered. The glass mattered more.
Then came the second tasting in the 1892 House—also included in my ticket, and entirely unexpected. More wines. Small snacks between them. Proper presentation. Changyu understood that heritage is not merely something to print on a label. It must be made tangible.
Old Methods and New Machines
I had seen the same principle in Chinese factories.
China does not regard inheritance and technology as opposites. It will retain an old cellar, install an interactive museum above it, build a smart factory outside the city and sell the resulting product through a phone. The old method is preserved where it still produces value. New technology is added where it improves scale, control or presentation.
Europe increasingly does something different. It retains the name, sells the history and alters the product.
China inherited European methods and turned them into living industries. Europe increasingly retains the trademarks while reducing what stands behind them.
What Drink Is For
China also remembers that alcohol has a function beyond intoxication.
It is a social solvent. It greases the machinery of business. It turns meals into negotiations and acquaintances into temporary friends. It softens courtship, supplies ritual and allows things to be said indirectly that might otherwise remain unsaid.
Europe once understood this without needing it explained. The pub, the wine table, the brewery and the village bar were pieces of social infrastructure. Alcohol belonged to place, season, work, courtship, argument and reconciliation.
Now it is increasingly treated as a taxable unit delivered by a multinational brand.
When the Name Replaces the Beer
Stella Artois and Newcastle Brown Ale are useful examples.
Both genuinely date from the 1920s, and the original Stella brewery at Leuven has a much older history. But the existence of a historical name does not make the modern product historically continuous. The British Stella version was reduced from 5 per cent alcohol to 4.8 per cent in 2012 and then to 4.6 per cent in 2020. Ireland received the same reduced-strength product. The branding, chalice and ancient dates remained in place while the liquid changed beneath them.
Newcastle Brown Ale suffered similarly. Originally brewed in a brewery next to St James’ Park, I could smell the brewery as a child when my Dad drove us through Newcastle centre to our Grandmothers house. It firstly moved out of the city centre to be brewed across the Tyne in Gateshead. Arguably, perhaps, it retained much of the heritage and ingredient sources, but is now brewed at Tadcaster, and if I read the ingredients, I find myself wondering how much of that was in the original recipe.
The names carried the history. The beer no longer had to.
Moretti possesses a real Italian lineage, but much of the beer sold under that name in Britain is now brewed in Britain. Place has been detached from provenance. Madrí dispenses with even that inconvenience. It was created in 2020, brewed in Yorkshire and dressed immediately in the costume of Madrid.
Europe has become very good at manufacturing foreignness.
Meanwhile, real British beers have disappeared. I remember Flowers. I remember Courage Directors, a rich, full-bodied bitter that tasted like beer rather than a chilled advertising campaign. The Flowers brewery itself closed in 1968. The name wandered through later contract-brewing arrangements after the place and company behind it had gone. Directors is now listed as no longer brewed.
These were not obscure liquids preserved only in enthusiasts’ notebooks. They were recognisable British beers. Once lost, they cannot be recreated merely by transferring the trademark to another factory.
The destruction continues. Britain ended 2025 with 137 fewer breweries than it had begun the year. Historic cask ales have been deleted, breweries closed and product ranges reduced as ownership has concentrated.
The knowledge still exists. The structure no longer rewards it.
The State at the Cellar Door
Tax has accelerated the decline.
Ireland imposes €3.19 of excise on an ordinary 750ml bottle of still wine and then charges 23 per cent VAT on the wine, the commercial margin and its own excise. The €3.19 duty therefore costs the buyer €3.92 at the till. On a €15 bottle, €5.99—almost 40 per cent of the entire price—is direct tax. Ireland also imposes minimum unit pricing, preventing a 12.5 per cent bottle from being sold below roughly €7.40 regardless of what the wine is worth.
Denmark uses the same method. The wine duty on a normal bottle is 8.45 kroner. Once 25 per cent VAT has been applied to that tax, it costs the buyer 10.56 kroner. On a bottle selling for 100 kroner, 28.45 kroner is excise and VAT.
Britain now charges about £2.87 of duty on a 75cl bottle at 12.5 per cent, followed by 20 per cent VAT. The consumer therefore pays £3.44 merely for the excise and the VAT imposed upon it, before considering the VAT on the wine and commercial margin. On a £15 bottle, approximately £5.37—nearly 36 per cent—is direct tax.
The state taxes the wine and then taxes its own tax.
Germany proves that this is a choice. It levies no excise duty on still wine. A €15 bottle carries 19 per cent VAT, amounting to €2.39 within the shelf price. The equivalent Irish bottle contains €5.99 in excise and VAT: two and a half times as much direct consumption tax.
Europe then wonders why drinkers retreat towards industrial products supported by enormous economies of scale.
Manufactured Sweetness
The wine market offers its own version of the same decline.
Vineyards are being grubbed up in Europe as consumption falls. At the same time, supermarket shelves fill with mass-produced imports whose principal achievement is consistency. Much of the Australian wine sold in Europe is absolute rubbish. Some of it is disgustingly sweet, with a suspiciously manufactured sweetness closer to an alcoholic soft drink than a proper wine. I do not trust it, and I will not buy it.
The contrast with Yantai was difficult to miss. In Europe I increasingly inspect bottles for signs that the contents have been manipulated into anonymous sweetness. In China I found a producer placing several wines in front of me, explaining the differences and providing food between them so that each could be tasted properly.
China was treating wine as a product worth understanding. Europe’s mass market increasingly treats it as a branded alcoholic delivery system.
What China Remembered
None of this was what I expected to find.
I came to China looking for scale, speed and new technology. I found those things. I travelled on the trains, walked through the cities and watched factories trying to remove human inefficiency from production.
But alongside the future I found old European knowledge still at work.
German brewing in the city the Germans built at Qingdao. A Polish brewer from the Russian Empire in Harbin. European vines and an Austro-Hungarian winemaker in Yantai. Malt, cellars, oak barrels, brandy and wine. Techniques imported during the age of concessions and railway empires, absorbed by China and carried forward after the foreigners had gone.
Europe exported the methods. China kept making the products.
Europe kept the labels, reduced the strength, moved the breweries, taxed the bottles and sold the remaining history through advertising.
China learned to turn heritage into an experience. Europe learned to turn it into a trademark.
I came to China expecting to see the future. I did not expect it to remind me what drink had once been: craft, place, hospitality and social movement.
I had never heard of Yantai until I began working out a route north through China. Then it appeared for two entirely different reasons.
It was the port from which I could take the ferry across the Bohai Sea to Dalian. It had also been one of the great treaty ports of northern China, with a remarkable collection of European consulates and houses still standing around Yantai Hill.
A ferry and a lost colony on the same route. Two nights seemed sufficient.
Yantai opened as a treaty port in 1861. The British established the first consulate. The French, Americans, Germans, Danes and others followed, until the hill and harbour had acquired an entire foreign quarter.
And so I stopped to inspect the colony.
I booked a hotel beside the railway station. It was a surprise to discover that the passenger station on Beima Road was not completed until 1958. For most of its commercial history, Yantai had faced the sea. The railway came late to a city built around ships.
The approach by train was another surprise. Under a clear blue sky, the low hills, fields and coastal light looked at moments more like Tuscany or Greece than the China presented to us on television. Stepping out into the Yantai sunshine only strengthened the impression.
It was no surprise to discover later that this was wine country.
I spent much of the first day wandering around Yantai Hill. The old consulates, residences and trading buildings had not been cleared away or buried beneath a grand redevelopment. They remained among the trees and paths, forming something close to an open-air museum.
Look like late British Victorian to me, on Yantai Hill
Down by the harbour, the European buildings stood with modern Yantai rising behind them. The German presence was easy to spot. I later discovered that the neighbouring building was Danish. Of course it was.
German and Danish embassies, dwarfed by modernity
The contrast was the interesting part. The old foreign quarter had not been left as a dead imperial exhibit. It sat inside a working Chinese port, with ships in the harbour, towers behind it and a modern city continuing to grow around the remains.
The next major stop was the Changyu Wine Culture Museum. I bought the premium ticket without quite understanding what it included, then found myself tasting wine in the old cellar and later receiving an entire second tasting in the 1892 House. After the first tasting, when everyone else had left, one of the women brought me a separate glass of their best award-winning red.
The wine deserves its own post. It is enough to say here that it was excellent, the museum was far better than expected, and it revealed another side of China I had not imagined finding.
Yantai also supplied a more immediate discovery. Near the hotel was a small place serving wonton soup for about £1.30. I went back every morning. Whether my new addiction is to wontons or monosodium glutamate remains under investigation.
Then it was time for the ferry.
As a two-day stop, Yantai had been almost perfect: Mediterranean light, Victorian consulates, Chinese wine, cheap wonton soup and a working harbour from which I could continue north.
I had inspected the colony and found, regrettably, that the Europeans had all left.
The Chinese had kept their houses and made a living museum of the hill.
Dalian was waiting. There were more colonies to inspect.
A German Colony, a Japanese Interlude, and a Rather Good Brewery
There are places I have wanted to visit for years, and Qingdao was one of them. The very improbability of a German colony on the Chinese coast had always fascinated me. More remarkable still was the suggestion that much of it remained intact.
The Germans called it Kiautschou, and they did not have long to enjoy it. Having acquired the territory in 1898, they began constructing their little piece of Germany on the Yellow Sea. By 1914, Germany had found itself on the wrong side of the First World War, and Japan arrived to relieve the Kaiser of his Chinese possessions.
Sixteen years. Not much time to build a colony, let alone leave a lasting impression.
Yet walking around Qingdao, I found myself astonished by what the Germans had achieved.
The railway station is magnificent. The former governor’s residence is a fabulous Art Nouveau mansion, complete with elaborate interiors, beautiful fireplaces and all the architectural confidence of an empire that evidently expected to remain for centuries.
Qingdao German station
Elsewhere, German buildings are scattered throughout the old town, connected by broad streets and substantial infrastructure. There is the famous pier, the beginnings of a modern port, and, naturally, a brewery.
The Germans had arrived with plans for something rather grand.
And judging by what remains, they were making excellent progress when history interrupted them.
Indeed, their influence proved so enduring that, more than a century after their departure, the Chinese are still borrowing from their architectural vocabulary. Modern shopping centres reproduce German façades, while the newer railway developments echo the old European buildings.
There are even bratwursts being sold on the streets.
And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, there is Tsingtao beer.
Perhaps there is something in the old suggestion that beer contributes to happiness, because the people of Qingdao seem rather more inclined to smile than their counterparts in Shanghai.
The brewery itself was one of the principal reasons for my visit.
Established in 1903, it remains the great surviving commercial achievement of the German occupation. The original brewing equipment and buildings provide a fascinating glimpse into the industrial technology that Germany brought to China.
But there was another interesting discovery.
Although founded by German and British commercial interests, the brewery’s early leadership included a remarkable number of British businessmen associated with Shanghai.
Strong German-Anglo relations and a business deal conducted in sound money, backed by real silver coinage
Here was colonial capitalism operating across imperial boundaries. German territory, German brewing expertise, British capital and commercial connections, Chinese labour and an enormous potential market.
Whatever their governments might have been doing, the businessmen were evidently capable of reaching an accommodation.
And they produced a remarkably successful beer.
The Japanese Arrive
The Japanese inherited something rather promising when they captured Qingdao in 1914.
They also recognised its potential.
Walking through the old commercial district, I discovered an extraordinary collection of buildings dating from the Japanese occupation and the years immediately following it.
The architecture is fascinating. German influences mingle with Japanese interpretations of European Art Nouveau, gradually giving way to the harder lines and geometric confidence of Art Deco.
Some of the streets are almost absurdly beautiful.
Here are banks, commercial offices and imposing institutional buildings, constructed by people who clearly believed that Qingdao was going to become an important centre of international trade.
And then there is the former Japanese commodities exchange.
What an extraordinary building.
Completed around 1920, it resembles a great concrete temple to commerce. Monumental, imposing and entirely unexpected, it dominates its surroundings with the confidence of an institution that anticipated considerable wealth passing through its doors.
I had not expected to find anything quite like it.
The Japanese were not merely occupying a former German colony. They were investing in its commercial future, building the infrastructure through which they intended to profit from northern China.
Inside, some of the decorative paintings offer an intriguing glimpse into the thinking of the period.
Among them are scenes depicting the Puritans arriving in America and trading with the indigenous inhabitants.
An interesting choice of subject for a Japanese commercial building in China.
One wonders whether the intended parallel was entirely accidental.
The Japanese had arrived in a foreign territory, bringing capital, technology and commercial institutions. The Chinese possessed the land, the labour and the resources.
Perhaps the paintings were simply celebrating international commerce.
Or perhaps they reveal something about how Japan imagined its own relationship with China.
Either way, they are a remarkable survival.
The Peace That Nobody Liked
The Japanese occupation was not destined to last.
At Versailles in 1919, Germany’s former rights in Shandong were awarded to Japan rather than returned to China.
The Chinese were furious. The decision helped ignite the May Fourth Movement and became one of the great grievances of modern Chinese nationalism.
By 1922, following the Washington Conference, Japan had agreed to return Qingdao to Chinese administration.
Imagine the frustration.
The Japanese had captured a valuable German possession, invested heavily in its commercial infrastructure, constructed magnificent banks and an enormous commodities exchange, and then found themselves obliged to surrender political control.
All those splendid buildings, intended to anchor a profitable Japanese future, now stood in a Chinese city.
A rather expensive lesson in the uncertainties of empire.
The Germans, meanwhile, had their own reasons to be dissatisfied with the peace.
Their overseas possessions were gone. Alsace-Lorraine had returned to France. Territories had been transferred to Poland, and Northern Schleswig had returned to Denmark.
I found myself imagining a rather curious scene inside the former German governor’s mansion.
A few German gentlemen seated beside those magnificent Art Nouveau fireplaces, perhaps joined by their Japanese counterparts, discussing the injustices of the post-war settlement.
The Germans complaining about the territories they had lost.
The Japanese complaining about the territory they had been compelled to surrender.
Both convinced that the victorious powers had treated them rather badly.
Perhaps, over a glass of something suitably strong, they might have wondered whether these injustices could someday be corrected.
Perhaps even together.
History, of course, would eventually produce a German-Japanese alliance, although not quite in the circumstances of my imaginary gathering.
Still, standing inside that beautifully preserved mansion, it was difficult not to entertain the thought.
A Colony That Refuses to Disappear
What makes Qingdao so remarkable is not simply the survival of individual buildings.
It is the survival of an entire architectural landscape.
The Germans were here for barely sixteen years. The Japanese governed the territory for only another eight before its return to China.
Yet both left an extraordinary physical inheritance.
Protestant Church. Wins for me over the larger catholic cathedral
And much of it remains astonishingly intact.
I spent hours wandering the streets, continually discovering another remarkable façade, another unexpected building, another reminder of the extraordinary ambitions of the men who once governed this distant corner of China.
The architecture tells a story that political maps cannot.
Empires arrive, draw boundaries, invest fortunes, erect monuments to their own permanence and then depart.
The buildings remain.
Sometimes they even become the architectural inspiration for the people who inherit them.
Qingdao is particularly good at this.
And a word about the entrance fees. Several of the finest buildings charge admission, but I found the interiors so extraordinary that the experience exceeded my expectations tenfold.
The governor’s jugendstil residence alone is worth the journey.
Beautiful rooms, original architectural details, magnificent fireplaces and a level of preservation that allows the visitor to step directly into the world of Imperial Germany.
It is one thing to read about Kiautschou.
Quite another to stand inside it.
I had wanted to visit Qingdao for years, and it exceeded everything I had imagined.
A fabulous city, full of architectural surprises, improbable history and exceptionally good beer.
But there are other former imperial possessions to inspect, and the Chinese high-speed railway awaits.
So it is time to leave the Germans and Japanese behind.
I have an appointment at the British Embassy.
Unfortunately, I fear I may be about 100 years too late.
Money is made, exchanged, counted and reinvested. The towers, banks, shopping streets and endless movement of goods carry the same message: this is a city that understands trade.
It has also quietly emerged as the world’s biggest physical gold exchange.
Walking through it, a principle from monetary history kept returning to me.
Gresham’s Law.
Bad money drives out good.
Under a gold standard, take two instruments, each denominated at one pound: a paper banknote and a gold sovereign. The sovereign contains the gold. The banknote promises its equivalent. The denomination is the same. The backing may not be.
When both must be accepted at the same nominal value, the doubtful banknote is spent and the sovereign retained. The paper circulates. The gold goes into reserve. Its owner understands the difference between a pound printed on a promise and a pound settled in gold.
Shanghai gives that distinction physical form. Paper claims move across screens while gold is weighed, tested, bought and stored. One can be created by extending a balance sheet. The other must be acquired.
A boy was born in 1971, the year the United States closed the gold window. The dollar’s remaining convertibility into gold was suspended. The suspension was called temporary. It became the new order.
That boy later entered the relationship market believing men and women still exchanged hard currencies. Restraint and exclusivity would meet loyalty and commitment. He would build his reserves. The woman would preserve hers. Both would bring something scarce to the settlement.
He had little capital and little success. He worked, built a career, accumulated money, bought a house and established a company. Female interest increased. He thought his personality had finally been recognised.
His personality had not suddenly appeared. What had changed was the backing.
He had become hard currency.
Meanwhile, women had been issuing another currency. Sexual access circulated without the commitment he was still accumulating the means to provide. Other men received it on terms that were never offered to him.
He had remained on the old standard while the new currency circulated elsewhere.
One market. Two instruments. Different exchange rates.
II. Hard Currency
The inherited bargain rested on reciprocal scarcity.
But the starting balance sheets were different.
The man began with an empty vault. The woman began with the gold already in hers.
His task was accumulation. Hers was preservation.
The female currency was femininity, purity, sexual restraint, selectivity and exclusivity. The male currency was courtship, loyalty, provision and permanence. He had to build the value he would eventually offer. She had to preserve the value with which she entered the market. The bargain joined acquired reserves to preserved reserves.
The male side takes years to build.
Competence requires practice. Capital requires earnings, restraint and accumulation. Stability requires decisions repeated long after their novelty has disappeared. A reputation for reliability requires a record. The house, the savings and the capacity to provide represent life already expended.
Commitment then adds a claim on life still to come.
A man who commits allocates future time, income, attention and optionality. He accepts obligations that may outlast the attraction which brought him into the arrangement. His offer is backed by both accumulated reserves and future production.
That currency is expensive to manufacture.
It does not become cheap because someone else wants it. Nor does a man become obliged to release it merely because he has succeeded in accumulating it.
The female reserve was the scarcity and selectivity attached to sexual access. It was not manufactured through years of earnings. It was present at the beginning, and its preservation determined what remained available for the eventual settlement.
Cheap issuance did not add gold to that vault. It spent the scarcity which had given the original promise its value. More paper could circulate while less backing remained behind the denomination.
The old bargain made sense while both vaults could support the exchange. Being chosen for an exclusive settlement meant something when access had not already circulated on easier terms.
The sexual revolution altered that relationship.
It did not immediately abolish the old denomination. It introduced a cheaper instrument beside it, then continued asking for settlement at the old price.
III. The Second Currency
The new currency allowed paper claims to multiply without a corresponding increase in reserves.
Traditional courtship had pillars: family, church, community, reputation and ceremony. Those institutions imposed friction, kept records and made issuance visible. Modern dating demolished the temple and handed every woman a private printing press. Circulation became opaque. Reserves could not be audited. The ledger became self-reported. Yet every note still arrived marked scarce, exclusive and premium-grade. Every dating profile might as well have stood between two Corinthian columns with an issuing clerk behind the desk.
Hookups, casual sex and situationships allowed it to circulate without courtship, exclusivity or a credible future. Contraception and abortion weakened the connection between sex and childbirth. Feminism reduced the reputational cost.
Digital platforms widened the market. Anonymous foreign holidays removed the local ledger: no shared social circle, no lasting reputation and a departure date built into the transaction. A woman could issue freely abroad, return to the man whose commitment remained in place and seal the foreign episode inside a separate compartment. He continued pricing the relationship without knowing a second ledger even existed.
What had required a substantial commitment could be issued for immediate desire.
But increased supply did not mean equal access.
Desire selected its recipients. Highly desired men could obtain the new currency without supplying the old backing. They did not need to offer a house, provision, patient courtship or marriage to receive what other men were still being told to earn.
Men outside that flow continued accumulating. They worked, established themselves and prepared for a relationship market whose advertised terms still required serious commitment.
They encountered scarcity while supply expanded elsewhere.
This was the central asymmetry. The same market could be liquid for one class of men and expensive for another. The men receiving cheap issuance had little reason to buy the old bundle. The men expected to buy the old bundle had often received little of the cheap issuance.
They were not the beneficiaries of the inflation.
They became its later counterparties.
The two instruments circulated inside the same market, while feminism insisted that the exchange rate had never changed.
IV. The Hidden Ledger
Choosing a bank requires more than admiring its frontage.
The building may look solid. Its name may inspire confidence. The banknote may carry a handsome promise to pay one pound. None of that establishes how much gold remains in the vault or how many paper claims have been issued against it.
The question is not whether the note looks respectable. It is whether the bank can support the settlement it promises.
The same examination belongs in the relationship market. A man who has spent years filling his own vault needs to know whether the institution offering him a note has preserved its reserves, or merely continued printing against an old reputation for solidity.
Every bank has an issuance history.
A printed denomination does not establish backing. Nor does the declaration of present exclusivity erase the terms on which access was previously offered.
The ledger contains more than a number. It records selectivity, volume, recipients and price. Who received access? What did they contribute? How readily was it offered? What is now being demanded from the man approached for permanence?
Extensive prior sexual availability reduces a woman’s long-term relationship value in the male market. The proposition is worth less because the scarcity and selectivity men value have already been reduced. Calling the history irrelevant does not restore them.
A man who received access through desire alone and a man later asked for resources, legal commitment and years of loyalty were offered different prices. The later offer cannot be valued honestly by looking only at its label.
Present exclusivity is part of the offer. Its history is part of the valuation.
Concealment adds duplicity, but concealment does not create the dilution. The issuance has already occurred. Hiding the ledger merely prevents the next counterparty from pricing it accurately.
Nor does a higher asking price establish a higher value. A demand for permanence can reveal what the issuer now wants without demonstrating what the buyer will receive.
The banknote says one pound.
The vault determines what that promise is worth.
V. Slagflation
The expansion of sexual currency created a powerful arbitrage.
A woman could issue cheaply to men selected for immediate desire, then seek a permanent settlement from another man in the old denomination: courtship, resources, protection, loyalty and marriage.
One market supplied excitement. The other supplied backing. The advantage lay in taking the benefits of both while denying that the first transaction changed the value of the second.
This was slagflation.
The consequence had been delayed, not abolished. Issuance and settlement had simply been separated by a decade or more.
The new currency expanded while the advertised cost of male commitment remained high. Sexual access became easier to issue. The years required to build a solvent, competent and reliable man did not become easier to compress.
Women watched other women, learned what could be obtained and what could be withheld, and adjusted their behaviour. What began as an advantage became a convention. The market taught its participants how the market was played.
An individual strategy became a market norm. The norm then justified the strategy. Feminist doctrine declared female issuance private and irrelevant while leaving male resources, intentions and future commitment open to inspection, negotiation and judgment.
The asymmetry entered the accounting itself. One ledger was examinable. The other was supposed to be accepted unopened.
For a considerable period, the trade cleared.
Men continued accumulating against the inherited bargain. They assumed that the currency offered to them had been preserved under a discipline resembling their own. Their assets were real. Their understanding of the exchange rate was obsolete.
The asset had not been scarce in the way they had believed. The earlier price had been low. The later price was high. A generation of men had kept accumulating against terms that no longer existed.
Women had circulated paper and requested settlement in gold.
The arbitrage depended on the later man accepting the denomination without examining the issuance. Once he compared the two, the difference could no longer be hidden inside the language of commitment.
VI. The Repricing
No arbitrage survives discovery forever.
Men began comparing exchange rates. They distinguished being desired from being selected to provide. They noticed when substantial obligations were being demanded for an offer previously made without them.
The relevant question became what the transaction was actually worth.
Why release years of accumulated capital and a claim on future life at the historic price when the reciprocal scarcity had already been diluted?
Repricing followed.
Some men offered less courtship, less provision and less commitment. Others extended the audit, watching behaviour before releasing reserves. Some accepted casual terms while refusing permanent liabilities. Others stopped trading.
The different responses had the same underlying effect: hard currency became harder to obtain.
This is the Gresham effect within the relationship model. Feminist orthodoxy continued treating the one-pound banknote and the one-pound sovereign as though matching denominations guaranteed equal backing. Men who recognised the difference began retaining their gold rather than exchanging it for paper of uncertain redemption value.
Their competence had not disappeared. Their capital had not vanished. Their capacity for loyalty had not ceased to exist. Those reserves were simply being withheld from transactions which failed to justify their release.
Once men withheld their half, the old reciprocal bargain could no longer circulate on demand.
Women called this male commitment phobia.
The market has no commitment phobia. It has a bid.
This was a valuation crisis.
The asking price remained high because women still wanted the old benefits. The bid fell because the buyer no longer accepted the old valuation. Calling him reluctant, immature or afraid of commitment did not close the spread.
Nor could additional accumulation solve it. A larger reserve does not improve the terms of a bad exchange. It merely gives the holder more to surrender.
The good money withdrew because its owners could finally see what they were being asked to buy.
VII. Into Reserve
Shanghai understands the distinction.
Paper moves quickly. Credit expands. Numbers multiply across screens. Physical gold remains something that must be weighed, tested, acquired and settled.
Its absence from ordinary circulation does not mean it has lost its value. It means its holders understand its value and refuse the offered exchange rate.
The same logic applies to accumulated male capital.
A man who has built resources, competence, stability and the capacity to commit holds assets with uses beyond the relationship market. They can finance movement, experience, independence and a life already worth living. Their value does not depend on surrendering them to someone else’s preferred settlement.
Commitment is available when the return justifies the allocation. Its mere availability creates no claim upon it.
The holder reads the ledger. He examines the issuing bank, its reserves and its history. He distinguishes a well-backed promise from a demand that his own gold should make good someone else’s paper.
When the exchange rate is false, he retains his gold.
Bad money has driven out good.
Bringing it back into circulation will require a serious repricing.
Harbin branch of Bank of Communications. Built in 1928 with a magnificent frontage that would impress any would-be depositor, Yet it faced mounting losses and was closed in 1942.
Last year, in Malaysia, a Chinese fortune teller informed me with the calm certainty of a man announcing tomorrow’s weather that a visit to China formed an essential part of my future.
Prophecy is generally improved by practical assistance. In 2026, a direct flight began operating from Dublin to Shanghai. Soon afterwards, I discovered that British visitors no longer required a visa for a stay of up to thirty days. Fate, aviation and Chinese immigration policy had reached an unusual degree of agreement.
It would have been almost superstitious not to go.
And so I flew to Shanghai to inspect the colony.
There was, officially, no British colony of Shanghai. This is one of those statements which is accurate without being especially informative. The British merely secured a concession, dominated a great part of the trade, erected banks and clubs of imperial confidence, raced horses and conducted themselves for the better part of a century as though the distinction were a technical one.
The terminology was delicate. The masonry was not.
Along the Bund stand the great commercial temples of the old order. None is grander than the former headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation: a building constructed with the confidence of men who expected their accounts to outlive governments. Around it, the riverfront still carries the weight of the trade which made Shanghai one of the great cities of the world.
Then there was the Shanghai Race Club. What could be more British than arriving in a foreign city and deciding that what it chiefly required was horse racing?
The racecourse has gone. Its great oval became People’s Square and People’s Park, while the surviving clubhouse now contains the Shanghai History Museum. The horses will trot no more. Yet inside the old building there remains a First World War memorial to twenty-eight members of the Race Club who left Shanghai to fight and did not return.
Revolution had cleared the course, changed the name and filled the grounds with the people. It had not quite managed to remove the dead.
The high number of officers suggests the class
The French maintained their own concession and left behind something rather different. It is still one of the loveliest parts of Shanghai in which to walk: long avenues, old houses, guarded gardens and buildings which retain the privacy of another age. The French architecture does not announce itself with the weight of the Bund. It hides behind walls and trees and waits to be discovered.
But the European remains are not confined to the recognised historic quarters. A random walk may suddenly produce an English Victorian building, an Art Deco villa or a piece of 1930s mock Tudor which would not look entirely out of place in a suburban street in England. Shanghai contains architectural encounters which seem implausible until one is standing in front of them.
British Victorian, Shanghai
These houses carry their lost stories silently. It is easy to imagine a European family living comfortably in an Art Deco house in the early 1930s, believing that the arrangements of life were permanent. Then came the Japanese attacks, the great battle of 1937, the isolation of the foreign settlements and finally their occupation in 1941. Many foreigners fled. Others were later interned. A house which had represented confidence and continuity became a witness to how quickly both could disappear.
The buildings survived their owners. Buildings often do.
Shanghai, however, is no museum. It is alive, immense and commercially ravenous. It may yet become the financial capital of the world. It already possesses the world’s largest purely physical spot gold exchange, a distinction which naturally interested me rather more than another avenue of designer shops.
The colonial merchants would have understood the modern city perfectly. The flags have changed, the language of government has changed and the scale has become almost unimaginable. The appetite for trade remains.
Shanghai has also produced what might be called Shallowhai.
This is the Shanghai of conspicuous wealth, where possession seems incomplete until it has been placed before an audience. Perhaps this is inevitable in a country where large private fortunes are still comparatively young, and in a city built upon finance and trade. Whatever the explanation, Shanghai is filled with malls, luxury brands and immense modern temples to Huawei, Apple and Samsung. I had never seen mobile telephone shops on such a scale. They possessed the lighting, proportions and solemnity once reserved for banks and churches.
One afternoon, a man drove past me in a pink open-top Bentley with music announcing his arrival several streets in advance. He may have intended to project success. Unfortunately, he reminded me chiefly of Mr Chow in The Hangover.
The mobile telephone governs the streets. People navigate with it, pay with it, order with it, photograph themselves with it and occasionally appear to experience the physical world only after it has been converted into an image on the screen. Even by European standards, the level of absorption is extraordinary.
Some of the younger women dress as anime characters or in elaborate mutations of Victorian costume. The empire has vanished, but Victorian dress has returned in China as a fashion accessory, photographed on a Chinese telephone and uploaded through a Chinese network. History does not always come back in the form expected.
Then there is Scamhai.
On my first day, nobody hassled me. I concluded that Shanghai was a remarkably safe and orderly city. Shanghai allowed me twenty-four hours to enjoy this conclusion.
The following day, I walked towards the Bund through rain of monsoon proportions, carrying a large umbrella borrowed from the hotel. The streets were unusually quiet. There were few pedestrians and consequently very few available targets.
I was approached constantly.
During that walk I was offered an extensive catalogue of goods, services and activities, the details of which need not detain us. Several approaches ended when I told the person to leave before discovering what was being proposed. Persistence appears to increase in inverse proportion to the number of alternative victims in sight. On a crowded day, I might have passed unnoticed. In an empty street beneath a hotel umbrella, I had evidently become the market.
There was also a restaurant where I strongly suspected that a menu carrying higher European prices had appeared for my benefit. I could not prove it. I could observe that the prices bore little relation to what food had cost elsewhere. I left them to their enterprise having paid a toll and abandoned further restaurant experimentation in this city.
Scamhai is not a separate city. It inhabits the same commercial instinct as the banks and boutiques, operating at the scale of the lone foreigner. Wherever money, strangers and appetite gather in sufficient concentration, somebody establishes a secondary market in the inattentive.
The visit lasted longer than intended. It was a national holiday week, trains were difficult to obtain and Shanghai became, for several additional days, less a destination than a position from which I was temporarily unable to advance.
There are cities which improve with enforced intimacy. Shanghai is better taken at speed. Its scale is exhilarating, its surviving history remarkable and its human theatre inexhaustible, but after a time the malls repeat themselves, the telephone screens glow with the same blue light and even imperial architecture ceases to surprise.
Eventually a seat became available. At Hongqiao Station, the long white bullet train waited to carry me 1,329 kilometres north to Qingdao.
The queue for coaches 9-16 of my train. Similar queue the other side for coach 1-8, me
The horses would trot no more. Shanghai now had faster animals.
Continuing my inspection of the colonies, over the past month I have visited two of the great walled plantation settlements of Protestant Ireland: Bandon in County Cork and Londonderry in County Derry.
They were built in the same century and for broadly the same purpose. Today, however, they present their history very differently.
Bandon
I went to Bandon with specific intent to walk the line of the old city walls.
Unfortunately, I was about 350 years too late.
Most of Bandon’s fortifications were dismantled following the Siege of Bandon in 1689. The official guided walk was nevertheless interesting because it showed where the walls had once stood and pointed out the fragments that remain. Parts have been incorporated into later buildings and boundaries, and the old line can still be followed through the town.
There is something I like about history surviving in this way. Not reconstructed and presented behind glass, but sitting awkwardly inside the modern town.
Bandon itself surprised me. Much of the centre has the solid appearance of an early nineteenth-century market town, with numerous buildings dating from around the 1840s and earlier. In places it reminded me of Alnwick in Northumberland.
The Protestant inheritance is also difficult to miss. Churches remain scattered through a town deliberately established as a Protestant settlement in Catholic Munster.
By good fortune, I was allowed up into one of the church bell towers and even got to ring one of the bells.
There are worse ways of announcing the arrival of an Englishman inspecting the colonies.
Another thing Bandon has lost entirely is its railway.
For a town of its history and size, that seems a considerable act of neglect. The railway once connected Bandon directly with Cork and continued west into the country beyond. Today the tracks are gone and the journey from Cork has to be completed by road.
In this respect, the colony has not been particularly well looked after.
First they took down the walls. Then they took away the railway.
Bandon also brought me unexpectedly close to another piece of history I have been following: the Allman family and their whiskey distillery.
Allman’s had been a huge exporter of Irish whiskey to the United States, only to become another victim of the economic crash of the 1930s.
The family story produced something rather less predictable than whiskey. A Catholic former servant married the considerably older Protestant Allman in 1925, despite an age difference of around thirty years. They had a child the following year and subsequently spent several years in France.
Catholic and Protestant. Servant and employer. A thirty-year age difference.
There is a story in there somewhere.
Londonderry
I contrasted Bandon by taking the train north from Dublin on the well-travelled route to Belfast, before continuing on to Portrush and Londonderry.
It was only when I visited Londonderry that I finally understood why it is called Londonderry.
The city was founded by the Corporation of London as part of the Plantation of Ulster. London was not simply added to the name as some later political affectation. The connection was there from the beginning.
London created Londonderry.
That led me to another interesting thought.
The City of London itself has always occupied a peculiar position within the United Kingdom. It has its own ancient corporation, its own privileges and its own traditions. Even the monarch has traditionally had to seek permission to enter the City.
So if London is itself effectively a city-state within a country, and Londonderry was created by London, perhaps Londonderry is itself an independent city-state within Northern Ireland.
An English colony inside an English colony.
I rather like that idea.
There was another striking contrast with Bandon.
In Bandon I had walked around looking for walls that were mostly no longer there. The line of the old fortifications could still be traced and fragments survived inside later buildings, but I had arrived about 350 years too late to see the town as it had once been.
Londonderry was different.
Here the walls survived.
Unlike Bandon, Londonderry was successfully defended during the Siege of 1689. The walls did what walls were supposed to do.
They kept the attackers out.
And more than three centuries later, I could still climb onto them and walk around the old Protestant plantation city.
From the walls I could look down over the Bogside, across the old city and out towards the surrounding country. The geography suddenly made sense in a way that it never could from reading about it.
By chance, I also discovered a second-hand bookshop immediately beside the walls and came away with another James Bond book.
This seemed entirely appropriate.
An Englishman buying a book about an agent of the Crown while inspecting the colonies.
Sometimes a journey provides its own jokes.
Bandon had left me following the ghost of a wall.
In Londonderry, I walked on it.
As I walked around the walls, I found myself thinking about several of the coins I have recovered while metal detecting, including a Charles II penny dated 1681.
It is a small, battered piece of copper, but somebody once carried it as money. Somebody lost it. And while it was still circulating, the events that would shape places such as Londonderry were unfolding around them.
I wonder what the original owner of that penny thought of the news arriving from elsewhere in Ireland.
What rumours had reached them? What did they know? Which side did they believe? Did any of it seem particularly important at the time?
We now compress the seventeenth century into kings, sieges, rebellions and dates.
The person who dropped my penny did not have that luxury.
They were simply living through it.
More than three centuries later, I picked up their coin from the sand.
And then I walked the walls.
The Journey Home
The journey home took four trains and a bus.
I had the option of waiting two hours for the direct train home, but decided against it. In retrospect, I almost wish I had waited, if only to complete the sequence properly.
The Enterprise from Belfast was something else.
By three in the afternoon, half the carriage seemed to have cans in hand. It had the atmosphere of a travelling pub.
At one point, a disagreement over seating directly opposite me came close to becoming an altercation. One man was from Belfast. The other was from Dundalk.
I suppose some border disputes are not fully resolved even now.
I liked it.
Real life. Real people. Real history still alive in the genes.
After Bandon and Londonderry, perhaps that was the right way to finish it. Not in a museum. Not with a plaque. Not with somebody explaining what Ireland had once been.
On a train, with two men arguing across the old frontier.
Glen Hansard died in a motorcycle crash in Dublin in the early hours of Wednesday, 29 July 2026.
I saw the news almost as soon as it appeared. I happened to be awake during the night, and somehow the internet knew this would matter to me.
For me, Glen Hansard will always be the busker from Once, one of my favourite films.
It is the kind of love story that could only have been made in Ireland. There is no kiss. There is no sex scene. In the conventional sense, there is no romance at all.
Yet the whole film is a romance.
Two people meet, recognise something in one another and develop a profound admiration. They make beautiful music together, quite literally. Then they separate and return to the lives already waiting for them.
They never become a couple. The music is what happens instead.
Once struck a chord with me long before I came to Ireland. Since moving here, the film has acquired a geography.
I have stood on Grafton Street and looked towards the place where Hansard busked in the film—and where he had busked in real life long before it. I have been to Dalkey and Killiney Hill, where Guy and Girl look out across the coast and she tells him in Czech that she loves him, knowing he cannot understand.
It is the nearest the film comes to a declaration.
I have often wondered why some enterprising Dublin busker does not claim that stretch of Grafton Street and play the songs from Once on rotation. A man with the right voice and guitar could probably make a small fortune. I cannot be the only person who has walked down that street partly because of this film.
