One of the things that really annoyed me about China in those days was how extremely rude everyone I met was about 'Western food'. There was I, unfailingly polite and diplomatic, trying to look on the bright side of their grisly slaughter practices, accommodating their penchant for gristly innards, forcing myself to eat pig's brains -- and no one, absolutely no one, was prepared to treat me with equal good manners.

Whenever the subject of 'Western food' came up in conversation, people would dismiss it out of hand with a few barbed stereotypes: 'Xi can hen dan diao!' (Western food is very monotonous) or 'Xi can hen jian dan!' (Western food is very simple). My own compatriots had a habit of talking about 'Chinese food' as if it were a single tradition, collapsing the diverse regional cuisines of this vast country into a dull set menu of spring rolls, sweet-and-sour pork and egg-fried rice, or writing it off as 'junky' and 'gloopy'. Similarly, Chinese people all viewed 'Western food' as a single, rather boring, school of cookery. It didn't occur to them that you might eat differently in, say, Naples or Helsinki, Alabama or Paris. Often, I found myself having to remind people that France alone was the size of Sichuan Province, and that some people thought its cuisine was as distinctive and complex as the Sichuanese.

This might have been hilarious, but it didn't seem so on the many occasions when I went to great trouble and expense to cook Western food for my Chinese friends. My delightful Chinese teacher, Yu Weiqin, for instance, persuaded me once to make a traditional English dinner for a party she was arranging. Even deciding what to cook was a challenge, because it was impossible to obtain ingredients for most of the dishes I might have chosen. There were no fresh herbs or non-Chinese spices in the markets; and no supermarkets stocking tinned ingredients from abroad (in fact, there were no supermarkets at all). The only 'chocolate' one could buy was some revolting Chinese brand that consisted mainly of vegetable fat; cream was unheard of; and olive oil was sold in tiny bottles as a beauty product, as expensive by local standards as Chanel No 5 was in London. To add to my problems, Teacher Yu's kitchen, like every other domestic kitchen in China, lacked an oven. In the end, I clubbed together with some other foreign students to buy a small portable oven, and decided to make roast beef with potatoes and an apple crumble.

Afterwards, I wondered why I had bothered. Teacher Yu's friends found what I had cooked so outlandish that they saw no need to be polite in their comments. They roared with laughter at the menu, barely able to comprehend that I would offer my guests a meal consisting of only three or four dishes. 'Xi can hen dan diao!' (How bland Western food tastes!) they crowed, demanding chilli sauce to liven up the roast beef. 'Where's the rice?' they asked after the meal, filled with disbelief at the idea that we would make do with potatoes instead (in China, only starving peasants eat potatoes as a staple food). One middle-aged lady toyed with a piece of beef and then ate no more. Her husband curled his tongue at the revolting flavours of my apple crumble. And because Chinese people lacked the concept of dessert as a separate course, they all piled up their bowls with roast beef, buttered carrots, potatoes and apple crumble, all at the same time.

'Western food' was at that time a distant and exotic concept for most Chinese. In 1994, in the whole of Chengdu, a cultural centre and provincial capital of some eight million people, there was a single restaurant specialising in foreign food, the Yaohua Canting. It called itself a 'Western food restaurant', and had been established in 1943, when it served chic foreign dishes like curry chicken, ice cream, salad, fried jam sandwiches and the acclaimed lao mian, a concoction of pasta covered in a thick eggy sauce and baked in an oven. In the forties, it was the trendiest place in town, frequented by well-heeled and well-educated youths, and it had somehow survived nationalisation in the fifties and the Cultural Revolution in the sixties to limp into the nineties in a new location on Dong Da Street. I visited it once, although I never ate there because the menu and atmosphere were so weird and alien. The place was decorated in what the managers clearly believed was cutting-edge Western style, with framed images of cigars and cocktail glasses in heightened graphics, and lurid photographs of scantily clad Western women, pouting provocatively. The tables were laid ostentatiously with knives, forks and spoons. The menu, as I remember, featured old-fashioned European-style dishes: heavy soups, steaks and cutlets drowned in murky sauces.

Outside the rarefied atmosphere of these hang-outs for foreign businessmen and students, such delicacies were hard to find. The most dedicated foreign students at the university cycled for miles across town to buy a spongey version of French bread and margarine, just so they could avoid the local breakfast of watery rice porridge, fried peanuts and spicy pickled vegetables. Other than that, we had little alternative but to eat Sichuanese food all the time. This wasn't exactly a hardship, as you've probably gathered, but we did miss some things, like decent chocolate. Most of all, though, we longed for cheese. We fantasised about it, discussed it, and begged anyone coming to see us from Europe to bring some. My own father has always loathed cheese. He refuses to eat it, and flinches if you wave some under his nose. But in an act of stupendous generosity, he carried a boxful of slowly maturing and increasingly smelly cheeses (including Roquefort, Cheddar, and Camembert) around China for a week, before he finally arrived in Chengdu for a visit. I was almost as pleased to see the cheeses as I was to see him.

Apart from the Yaohua, there were two smart, five-star hotels in Chengdu that catered for visiting Westerners. The Minshan hotel offered a regular evening buffet that included extraordinary exotica like sliced cheese and salad, and on one occasion I ate a mushroom vol-au-vent and a steak in the swanky dining room at the top of the Jinjiang Hotel. Mostly, though, homesick foreign students and backpackers had to content themselves with occasional breakfasts at the city's only travellers' café, the Flower Garden, which served muesli with yoghurt and banana pancakes, and kept plastic packages of sliced processed cheese locked up in a glass cabinet like caviar or truffles (twelve rubbery and tasteless slices cost the equivalent of about ten bowls of noodles).

If it was difficult for us to eat 'Western food', it was almost impossible for the average Chengdu resident. The prices in the hotel restaurants were astronomical; no one on a local wage could afford them. And the whole eating environment was unfamiliar and intimidating, as I discovered when I invited a Sichuanese friend for a buffet supper in one of the hotels: she had never before used a knife and fork and had no idea how to hold them.

Some Chinese hotels I visited tried to please their few foreign tourists by serving 'Western breakfasts'. I remember the odd looks on waitresses' faces as they gave us little plates with eggs on them, fried on both sides, a few deep-fried potato chips on a saucer, some plain steamed buns, and glasses of milk. They offered these things to us as they might have fed live mice to a snake -- placing the strange, disturbing, and inedible victuals in front of a possibly dangerous creature, just to see what it did. Would we hiss as we licked them, or just swallow them whole, like a boa constrictor? One elderly Chinese man I met recalled his horror at having been served with a soft-boiled egg for breakfast during a visit to Hong Kong: 'It was still raw inside!' he said, still incredulous after about fifteen years. 'I hardly dared touch it!'

It always seemed to me comically ironic that while most of my compatriots saw the Chinese as barely civilised and promiscuous eaters of snakes, dogs and penises, the Chinese repaid the insult in spades. They saw what we ate as crudely simple, uncivilised in its rawness, and barely edible.

'I had Kentucky Fried Chicken once and it was disgusting,' he replied. This one experience, shocking, unhappy and vividly remembered, had soured his view of the culinary achievements of the entire Western world. I wanted to regale him with mouth-watering tales of sautéed foie gras, shepherd's pie, crême brulée, roasted lamb with garlic and anchovies, Neapolitan pizza, baked oysters with beurre blanc, and everything else I had tasted and adored in the West, but I didn't know how to begin. So I said nothing, but merely gazed at him in stupefaction.

At the tail-end of my time in Chengdu, American fast-food companies began to open their first outlets there, but they didn't do much to rehabilitate local opinions about the cuisines of the West. One young chef I met remarked casually that he 'didn't like Western food'. 'Oh really?' I asked, surprised that he'd even tasted any. 'What have you tried?'

The cooked barbarians were the kind of aliens with whom you could, at a pinch, do business. The raw barbarians (uncooked, un-Chinese, uncivilised), were beyond the pale. Even in modern China, strangers are known sometimes as sheng ren ('raw people'), while people you know are 'cooked' (shu ren). Such disdain reflects the fact that Chinese people traditionally avoid raw food. There are exceptions, like the marinated shellfish and crustaceans eaten in Chaozhou and the east. Long ago, too, the elite of China's most cosmopolitan dynasty, the Tang, who hobnobbed with bearded foreigners riding in by camel from the western deserts, dined sometimes on raw fish slices, perhaps the ancestor of modern Japanese sashimi. Broadly speaking, however, the Chinese have always liked their food to be not only cut into pieces, but also cooked. Cooking is seen as the root of civilisation: only barbarians remain at the evolutionary stage of 'eating fur, feathers and drinking blood'.

There was nothing new about this attitude to foreign food. In Chinese antiquity, barbarians were grouped into the 'raw' (sheng) and the 'cooked' (shu).

Cheese, of course, was almost inconceivable. Dairy products have been largely absent from the Chinese diet. Perhaps in the past they were too strongly associated with the rough dining habits of the northern and western barbarians, cheese- and yoghurt-eating nomads who periodically invaded China. And the Chinese, too, lacked pastureland amid their tight patchworks of rice fields. Although in the late twentieth century Chinese parents started feeding milk to their children, cheese is still widely regarded as disgusting: it was memorably described by one informant of the American anthropologist E. N. Anderson as 'the mucous discharge of some old cow's guts, allowed to putrefy'. Some Chinese friends of mine claim, with a grimace, to be able to smell milk in the sweat of Westerners.

Ancient prejudices about foreign food are encapsulated in the language of modern cookery. Ingredients that were brought in from the West along the desert routes of the old Silk Road still bear a linguistic stigma. Regular pepper is known as 'barbarian pepper' (hu jiao); the carrot is a 'barbarian radish' (hu luo bu). The character hu refers to the old Mongol, Tartar and Turkic tribes of the northwest, but it also means 'recklessly, foolishly, blindly or outrageously'. 'Hu hua' (hu talk) describes the ravings of a madman; hu gao means to mess things up; and other hu compounds refer to all kinds of mischievous, fraudulent, wild, careless, irritating and deranged behaviours. In the distant past, people who ate things like salad were clearly insane.

In the glory days of Chinese empire, the Chinese disdain for foreigners and the food they ate must have appeared to have had a certain legitimacy. Chinese cities, with their fine restaurants, bustling markets and glittering aura of civilisation, were the envy of the world. The hairy, round-eyed barbarians who wandered in occasionally from the desert were overawed: they had little to compare with this in their own, distant lands. But by the nineteenth century, the solid Chinese sense of cultural superiority was being eroded by the 'gunboat diplomacy' of the Western powers. The Chinese had been the inventors of gunpowder, paper, printing and the magnetic compass, but they hadn't used them to conquer the world. And the barbarians, with their red hair, staring eyes, filthy beards and uncivilised ways, turned out to be rather smart after all.

Even in the 1990s, history often cast a shadow over the life of a foreigner in China. I found myself accused, often, over the opium wars, when the United Kingdom had bludgeoned China into accepting a deleterious trade of drugs for silver. Was I, personally, expected to apologise for these crimes of my ancestors, I wondered? I was certainly often treated as the personal representative of Her Majesty's Government, and expected to mind that Britain had to give Hong Kong back to the Chinese in 1997.

But if the Chinese were confused and ambiguous in their attitudes towards us, one thing was certain, and that was that our food was unbearable. In the beginning, I had a sense of missionary zeal when it came to introducing my Chinese friends to Western delicacies. They were showing me the delights of Chinese food, and I wanted to return the favour, feeling that cultural exchange should not be a one-way traffic. So, undaunted by that catastrophic supper for Teacher Yu and her friends, I went on trying to persuade the people I knew that 'Western food' wasn't as dreadful as they imagined. After all, if I could learn to love rabbit-heads, couldn't they learn to love cheese?

Many of the Chinese people I met viewed me and my foreign student friends through a bifocal lens of disdain and envy. On the one hand, weren't we in some sense barbarians? We were large; plump and overfed. We were a little bit smelly (all that dairy food). We were loose-living, decadent and immoral: one Chinese student told me the 'Panda Building' was known as a hotbed of sexual promiscuity (it probably was, by the Chinese standards of 1994). On the other hand, we were rich, and we were free. The mere fact that we were able to lark around for a year in China, dining out in restaurants and backpacking all over the country, was a sign of wealth and liberty.

Once, I made a beautiful Italian risotto, with arborio rice, dried porcini and parmesan. I was convinced that risotto would please my friends: after all, it was rice, with dried mushrooms not entirely unlike their own. I made my own rich stock, I added a dash of white wine, I spent forty minutes adding the liquid, spoonful by spoonful, until the rice was unctuous and creamy, fragrant with mushrooms. They all ate some, but they weren't impressed: no one could fathom why I had spent so long making a simple tang fan (soupy rice).

Even on the rare occasions when my friends enjoyed what I made, they always managed to sabotage my plan to give them a real taste of the West. When I took a home-made apple tart to a dinner party at the home of my old friends Zhou Yu and Tao Ping, for example, they cut it up into chopstickable pieces and served it alongside stewed pig's ear, tea-smoked duck and spicy seaweed salad. I reflected that, although I had certainly given them some 'Western food', in their manner of eating it they had turned it into something entirely Chinese.

Every time a foreign delicacy found its way into the Panda Building with the arrival of visitors from abroad, I would offer little titbits to my closest friends: Tuscan truffle pastes, fine olive oil, dark chocolate, parmesan cheese. From time to time, I cooked for them. But my efforts always backfired. I crashed into unexpected taboos, bored my dinner guests, revolted them or simply left them unsatisfied.

Since I first lived in Chengdu, 'Western food' has made enormous inroads into China. Aside from the country's colonisation by McDonalds and KFC, there are coffee bars and pizzerias, and the new supermarkets offer a range of imported products. But what Chinese people eat as 'Western food' is often far removed from what any European or American would consider normal. The UBC restaurant in Suzhou, for example, offers twenty-two kinds of coffee, but can't make a decent espresso. Its menu includes such 'Western' delicacies as 'boiled lemon cola with ginger', waffles with meat floss, fruit pizza, and 'duck chin with maggi sauce' (whatever that is). And when my Chinese friends share a bottle of the newly fashionable dry red wine (gan hong) over dinner, they drink it in a wholly Chinese manner, toasting each other with a thimbleful of wine at a time. (Chinese leaders, invited to state banquets in the West, have been known to dilute fine vintage wines with fizzy lemonade.)

In Shanghai in 2006 I bought a glossy cookery book entitled British Cuisine -- or, in Chinese, ying shi xi can (English-style Western food). Reading it, I laughed till I cried. Highlights of the typically British recipes it offered included a salad of arctic clams covered in a latticework of squirted mayonnaise; macaroni with shrimps; stuffed squid in black pepper and minced apple sauce; and braised cauliflower with quail eggs. The presentation of the photographed dishes was like some nightmare out of the seventies.

Still, these days people try to show a little cross-cultural sophistication. On a visit to Chengdu in January 2007, I was invited by a hotel owner to be guest of honour at a Western-style dinner party. We sat around the only grand oblong dinner table I've ever seen in China. It was laid with brass candelabras, knives, forks and sideplates, with two wine glasses per person. The chefs in the hotel kitchen had been trained in 'Western cuisine', and they served up a menu of cold beef in mustard dressing, baked oysters in hollandaise sauce, cream of sweetcorn soup, deep-fried rabbit leg with french fries, beef steak with onion rings, and some kind of pudding. (There was no cheese course, obviously.) The other guests, chefs and food-writers mainly, ignored the chopsticks that were offered as a back-up, and tucked into this exotic feast, grappling nobly with the unfamiliar knives and forks. But I noticed people stealing glances at me to see what to do with their bread and their sideplates, and I didn't have the impression that anyone particularly enjoyed the food. 'Welcome Fuchsia!' said my host, raising her glass to me with its thimbleful of red wine at the end of the meal, 'We welcome you to Chengdu from the land of Shakespeare, David Copperfield and Anna Karenina!'

If, in my first year in Chengdu, I failed miserably in my efforts to enhance the standing of 'Western food', I continued to throw myself into Sichuanese culinary culture. After that memorable cooking lesson with Feng Rui, my informal food studies gathered pace and my notebooks filled up with recipes. But I still wanted more. And so it was that my German friend Volker and I came up with a plan. Like me, Volker was a keen cook, and he was a veteran of Californian farmers' markets. Inevitably, we fell into the habit of eating out together and comparing recipes. One afternoon, he suggested that we might try to take some formal cooking classes. So we asked around, found the address of the famous local cooking school, the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and set off on our bicycles to find it.

It was a nondescript concrete building on a backstreet in the north-west of the city, but we heard the sound of chopping from an open window and knew we'd arrived. Upstairs, in a plain white room, dozens of apprentice cooks in white overalls were engrossed in learning the arts of sauces. They were pulverising chillies with pairs of cleavers on tree-trunk chopping boards, grinding Sichuan peppercorns to a fine brown powder, and scurrying around mixing oils and spices, fine-tuning the flavours of the rich dark liquids in their crucibles. The air hummed with a gentle, rhythmic pounding, and the sound of china spoons in china bowls. On long parallel tables sat bowls of ingredients; pools of soy sauce and chilli oil, piles of sugar and salt. Notebooks scribbled with Chinese characters lay around on the tables amid the blood-red chillies and scattered peppercorns. The light streamed in from open windows. Rushing into the room, eager and excited, we caused the usual commotion among the students by our alien presence alone.

In that strange, transitional period in Chinese history, there were no administrative procedures for dealing with our request. Was it even legal for foreigners to study, ad hoc, at a school that was part of the provincial bureaucracy? Probably not. But Sichuan is a place where the reins are a little loose, the lines a little blurred, and the people inclined to bend and yield. We settled down to a long afternoon of discussions and good-natured haggling. Cigarette packets were emptied, ashtrays filled. Tea mugs were replenished with hot water and drained countless times. Passing teachers and students dropped in to stare at us, and soon the large office was crowded. As dusk fell we came to a deal. We would take twice-weekly private classes at the cooking school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They would provide a cooking teacher and an interpreter as well as all the raw ingredients, and we would pay them a reasonable but hard-bargained fee in renminbi.

The principal of the school was a stout, jovial man with a crimson face, dressed in a Mao jacket in military khaki. We couldn't really understand his broad Sichuan dialect, so he summoned the school's English teacher, Professor Feng Quanxin, to interpret. A few other teachers gathered around. They all seemed amused, and perhaps flattered, by our unusual plea for tuition, coming out of the blue. The only foreign students the school had previously taught were an American couple who took private classes there in the late eighties. Such a request was not only odd because we were foreigners. The idea that university students like us would rather be in a kitchen than a library was extraordinary.

Volker and I cycled home, elated at our success. Our route took us across the span of the city, from the cooking school in the north-west to the south-eastern university campus. We passed through the old Manchu quarter, with its rows of higgledy-piggledy cottages, black and white with their dark timber frames and whitewashed walls. There were no street lights in the old lanes anyway, and that night there was a power cut, so candles lit the shops, houses and little restaurants that we passed. An old couple sat at a table outside their cottage on bamboo chairs, sharing a few simple dishes with rice. Shopkeepers stood over their packets of cigarettes and tealeaves, their faces illuminated by the glow of candles stuck in puddles of wax on glass-topped counters. Tempting aromas emanated from open-fronted restaurants. The deep, savoury smells of stews simmering away in tall clay pots on a row of gas burners; the whiff of beef in rice meal, small portions steaming away in a tower of little bamboo baskets; potato slivers sizzling in a wok with chilli and Sichuan pepper.

Over the following month, Volker and I learnt how to make sixteen classic Sichuanese dishes. Our teacher, Gan Guojian, was a moody, sardonic man of around forty, with a James Dean look about him and a cigarette permanently hanging out of his mouth. In each lesson, we would first watch Teacher Gan as he prepared the dishes of the day, and then we'd try to re-create them ourselves. We learnt how to hold our cleavers and cut our raw ingredients, how to mix seasonings and how to control the heat of the wok.

Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure. When I first went to China, I was already fluent in the language of basic French cookery. I could make a roux, mayonnaise, hollandaise, vinaigrette, pâtes sucrée or choux. I knew how to sauté ingredients at the start of a stew to make them more delicious, and I could often identify the seasonings and techniques that had been used in a finished dish. And so, in a sense, following a new French recipe was easy, it was just a matter of assembling it from the basic building blocks, the rudimentary culinary processes. The elements themselves were rarely new, however unfamiliar their combination. Even without a recipe, I could look at an ingredient and think of several ways of cooking it. But with Chinese cookery I hadn't a clue.

In those private classes with Teacher Gan, I began to learn the basic grammar not only of Sichuanese, but also of Chinese cuisine. An understanding of its structures and processes started to coalesce through the repetition of steps that at first seemed random. As the weeks passed, I found I could watch Chinese friends cooking at home and understand some of what was going on in the wok. And it was thrilling to be able to reproduce a few of the sumptuous dishes I was guzzling every night in the Bamboo Bar and the 'Italian' restaurant. Very quickly, I was hooked.

After each class Volker and I cycled back to the university with tin lunchboxes filled with the fruits of our culinary endeavours, which we submitted to a devouring crowd of fellow foreign students for tasting and assessment. The classes became the highlight of my week. I was in my element.

But time was running out. The cookery classes came to an end, and so did my scholarship. I decided to delay going home, and spent a long summer travelling around Tibet and Gansu Province with my Italian friends Francesca, Davide and Graci. We headed north from Chengdu into the forbidden areas of eastern Tibet, where we were arrested in every county town and had to sweet-talk our way out of fines in countless police stations. We hitchhiked on the back of rattling timber trucks, clinging to piles of unsteady tree trunks with a motley assortment of Tibetan monks and Chinese peasants. (After one particularly perilous ride, along the edge of a crumbling precipice, we discovered that our driver had only one eye.)

It was a magical, unforgettable trip. We crossed wild open countryside to visit remote monasteries, meeting farmers, smugglers, nuns and secret policemen. And every so often, out of the brilliant blue emptiness of the sky around us would echo the sound of horse hooves, and a few Tibetans, dressed like medieval princes in red woollen cloaks edged in gilding and fur, tied around their waists and slung roguishly off one shoulder, would gallop past, their horses' hooves kicking up a cloud of yellow dust. We travelled in a state of awe and wonder.

But if our senses were overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Tibet, we nearly went crazy with boredom at the food. Sometimes we ate the Tibetan staple, tsampa, with monks in their hilltop monasteries, rolling the ground barley flour and yak butter tea with our fingers into balls which we popped into our mouths. Otherwise, day after day, meal after meal, we ate in Hui Muslim restaurants that served almost nothing but pasta in different shapes, flavoured with gristly goat or mutton, green onions and chilli. Most ubiquitous were square sheets of pasta called 'pasta slices' (mian pian), which were delicious the first fifteen or twenty times, but which we eventually hated so much we called them 'business cards' (ming pian).

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One day, after a couple of weeks on the road, we fetched up in a one-horse village on the grasslands, where the usual Hui-run restaurant catered to passing pilgrims, nomads and traders. Tired, hungry and emotionally drained after another terrifying truck ride, we entered the shabby dining room, and were amazed to see an elaborate French menu chalked up on a blackboard near the kitchen. It read:

Foie gras

L'homard grillé

Sorbet

Consommé celestin

(The rest had been rubbed off.)

After two months of being richly fed with the beauty and spirituality of eastern Tibet, but starved in a more literal sense, I made my way back towards Chengdu alone, on the slow road that winds south over the grasslands from Lanzhou (the Italians had gone back to Venice to resume their university studies). Sometime in early September I fetched up in Zoigê, which had the wild feel of a frontier town. Tibetans in flamboyant cloaks and hats, edged in rare furs, daggers at their waists, hung around one-storey wooden shops. Horses were tethered along the street. And as I left the long-distance bus station and hauled my backpack towards the only guesthouse at which foreigners were admitted, my nostrils were assailed by the umistakeable scents of sizzling Sichuanese chilli bean paste and Sichuan pepper. My heart leapt: I knew I was on my way home. I ate that night in a small Sichuanese restaurant, which didn't serve business cards with mutton and onion, but fish-fragrant aubergines and twice-cooked pork.

It was like an hallucination, a shimmering mirage in the dusty eyes of desert wanderers. It was also one of the most exquisitely painful jokes I have ever encountered, and I have often wondered what genius of dry wit was its author (if you are reading this book, please get in touch!). We read, we yearned, we moaned, and then we sat down to our bowlfuls of business cards with gristly mutton, green onion and chilli.

And so my real apprenticeship began.

Arriving back in Chengdu, I didn't really have a plan. I had agreed to take over a flat in a workers' district from a British friend, for the princely sum of about £40 a month, with a vague notion of learning more about Sichuanese cookery. Through devious means I had managed to extend my green residence card for six months, although I was no longer at the university. It was unusual, then, for foreigners to live independently in China, and, strictly speaking, illegal. A few years before, it would not have been possible. But now the local police simply registered me and didn't seem to want to know the details.

Soon after my return, I cycled over to the cooking school to say hello to my teachers. I wanted to ask them if I might drop in from time to time to watch a few cooking demonstrations. But the principal welcomed me as an old friend, and told me that a three-month professional chef's training course had just begun. 'Why don't you join?' he asked me. It was a remarkable invitation. No foreigner had ever been accepted as a regular student before, and I suspect this, too, was technically illegal. But China was changing, the borders of possibility were expanding fast, and I had the impression that my teachers had been rather touched by this foreigner's inexplicable passion for their local cuisine. I agreed on the spot. Out of sheer kindness, the school allowed me to pay the same modest fees as my Chinese classmates, which amounted to around £100, all inclusive, for a three-month, full-time course. I enrolled and was promptly issued with a cleaver, a set of chef's whites printed with the name of the school, and two textbooks in Chinese, one on culinary theory, and one a collection of Sichuanese recipes.