As I began to explore new culinary regions of China beyond my old stamping grounds of Sichuan and Hunan, I found my thoughts drifting towards Fujian Province. Fujian lies on the south-eastern coast of China, sandwiched between Guangdong and the southern Yangtze region, and although it is now little known abroad, it was once at the forefront of Chinese international trade. In the Song Dynasty, Arab merchants sailed their galleys into the Fujianese ports of Quanzhou and Xiamen or Amoy, where they exchanged their cargoes of East Indian spices and luxury goods for Chinese porcelain and silk. Europeans traded at Xiamen from the sixteenth century until the mid-eighteenth. Later, the Chinese closed it to foreigners, but the British forced its re-opening as an international treaty port in 1842, after the first Opium War. As an entrepôt, Fujian has long exerted a steady, though rarely recognised, influence on the outside world: it is one of the most important sources of Chinese tea (the word 'tea' itself, and all its European variants, derive from Amoy dialect), and Fujianese immigrants, though less conspicuous than the Cantonese, are a powerful economic force in Western Chinatowns.

Fujian, like most provinces, has its own style of cooking, which the Chinese call min cuisine. Xiamen and the Fujianese coast are known for their oyster pancakes and other seafood delicacies; the mountainous areas of the north for wild foods that include bamboo shoots, mushrooms and all kinds of creatures. Fine oolong teas, including Tie Guanyin or 'Iron Buddha', and 'Big Red Robe' (da hong pao), are produced in many parts of the province. Living in Hunan, I had acquired a taste for Fujianese teas, and I'd sampled min cooking in the new Fujianese cafes of London's Chinatown, but I was hungry for more. And so I arranged to visit the scenic area of Wuyishan in the north with some old Sichuan University classmates who were living in Shanghai, before travelling to southern Fujian on my own.

We had set off along the Nine-Bend River in blazing sunlight, on a bamboo raft, the soft plish-plash of the poles in the water lulling us into a stupor. The famous karst limestone peaks of Wuyishan loomed up on either side. 'We call that one the tortoise,' said our young guide, pointing to a low bank of rock rising out of the water, 'and that's the Great King's Peak.' He improvised too, for fun: 'Over there we have the han bao, the hamburger' (of a fat stack of slabs), 'and that's the Titanic' (of a mighty prow of rock, facing downriver).

But the clouds gathered quickly, the rain spat, and then a torrential deluge began. Briefly, we took shelter under a vast overhanging cliff, but it was nearly nightfall, and we had to press on. By the end we were all sodden, shivering. Our guide dropped us off in pitch darkness by the bank. We clambered up to the road, and flagged down a lift in a passing vehicle.

That evening I was more in the mood for shepherd's pie than an extreme gastronomic experience, but it was my last night in northern Fujian and I felt I had to eat snake. Restaurant owner Mrs Liu had a few, coiled slinkily, in cages out the back, by the kitchen. Her husband stubbed out his cigarette and lifted the lid of one of the cages. A poisonous snake reared up angrily, hissing. He slammed the lid down again. When the snake had calmed down, he raised the lid more gently and grabbed it by the neck with a long pair of tongs. It lashed and writhed until he snipped off its head with a pair of scissors. He had two shot-glasses of strong rice vodka at the ready. The blood he shook into one of them, and then he pierced the ripped-out gall bladder and let it leak its greenish juices into the other.

Mrs Liu's restaurant looked out over teabushes towards craggy mountains. In daylight the view was spectacular; at night it was a dark and peaceful place. The picture windows were unglazed, so you heard the loud hum of the insects as you ate, and felt that you were part of the landscape. Mrs Liu specialised in local ingredients, many of them wild. Her fridges were stocked with exotic fungi: finger-like 'dragon's claws', golden trumpets, grey 'thousand hands', slices of a large mushroom named locally after the Great King's Peak. Wildflowers with bright pink petals sat on the shelves alongside bamboo shoots and clawlike bulbs. There was another fridge too, for the meat. It contained some run-of-the-mill pork, but that wasn't really why people went to Mrs Liu's. The customers who frequented her establishment wanted the wild muntjac, wild rabbit, wild pheasant, wild turtle, snake…

'Drink them immediately,' he told me. So I put my lips to the rim of each glass in turn, and drank the traffic-light cocktails, the blood swirling scarlet in the first, the second bitter and invigorating. The strong liquor scorched my throat and brought tears to my eyes, while the sight of the raw swirling blood made me feel a little queasy. Then I watched Mrs Liu's husband slip off the snake's skin easily, like a piece of silk underwear, eviscerate and chop its carcass, and throw it into a pot of boiling water, with a handful of wolfberries.

As a foreigner who had made a decision, long before, to eat everything, I should have been in my element. But ethical dilemmas were creeping up on me, more and more. By now I knew that some species of muntjac were endangered. How was I to know whether the one on the table was among them? It was the same with almost everything in Mrs Liu's fridge, when I thought about it. I hoped that the snake whose blood and gall I'd just drunk was not a wild five-pace snake (the long-noded pit viper is known in Fujian as the wu bu she, because you'll drop dead after five paces if it bites you), but I was no expert on snake markings, and Mrs Liu was open about her sale of endangered species.

The kitchen was a simple affair, clean, white-tiled, with a sink and a couple of gas burners. The cooking was straightforward too, but the ingredients so fresh and fine that it all tasted magnificent. Our snake soup was refreshing, the flesh tender and savoury on its snagged, spiny nuggets of backbone. We ate sliced muntjac with fresh red chilli and onion, robust and gamey; wild mushrooms; pheasant red-braised with carrot and chilli; rabbit with sweet peppers, ginger and garlic; and a wild green known as 'ginseng vegetable'. Mrs Liu had run out of eggs, so when we ordered some egg-fried rice, she sent her son out into the live, twittering darkness to find a villager who kept hens.

'Oh, they carry out inspections from time to time,' she rattled away, with a vague smile, 'but we usually know when they're coming.' Once she was caught red-handed with a fridgeful of illegal wild creatures, and the inspectors wanted to fine her 50,000 yuan. But she buttered them up by inviting them for dinner, and got away with paying just five thousand. 'Anyway,' she went on, 'local officials themselves eat endangered species. Of course they daren't do it publicly, in fancy city places, but in a quiet, out-of-the-way spot like this, it's okay. And there are different grades of protected animals. There are heavy, heavy penalties for killing Grade One State-Level Protected species, like the panda.' She mimed a knife slitting her throat. 'For Grade Twos, you're looking at six months in prison. But Grade Threes are sold openly on the market, like the muntjac you just had for dinner.' (A sharp pang of guilt.)

'Bao hu dong wu (protected animal),' she said in a stage whisper when she showed me a dead turtle in the fridge. She had one live five-pace snake in a cage, and a cobra curled, dead drunk, in a jar of spirits and medicinal herbs. 'Isn't it risky selling these things?' I asked her. 'Don't you get raided?'

Like most Chinese peasants, my driver was a walking materia medica, eloquent on the edible and medicinal properties of the countryside. 'This herb,' he said, stopping to pluck a leaf or two, 'can be infused in water as a treatment for heatstroke.' In the late summer he worked as a mushroom picker, supplying the tables of local restaurants. The most valuable, he said, was the 'red mushroom', which dyes a soup broth pink.

'What kind of person spends two thousand yuan on a bear's paw?' I asked Mrs Liu.

'Oh, you know, rich company bosses and Party or government officials,' came the reply.

'You won't find bear's paws in anyone's fridge, that's for certain. It's too dangerous. But you can have anything if you set your heart on it. Want a bear's paw? Let me know the day before, and I'll make sure I get it. You'll have to give me a deposit of a thousand yuan upfront, and another thousand after dinner. I get that kind of stuff from a middleman, so we don't have to keep it hanging around.'

The next day my friends returned to Shanghai and, alone, I hitched a ride on a motorbike up a wildly beautiful valley. My driver and I passed terraced fields neat with tea bushes, bamboo groves, and stubbly ricefields where a few water buffalo grazed. At the foot of a mountain, we left the bike and climbed stone steps to a Buddhist temple, high, high above, that clung to the ragged rock of a sheer cliff-face.

'What about wild animals? Snakes and bears?' I asked him.

A couple of hours later, our small motorbike puttered back along the road, and we turned up a steep driveway which brought us into the courtyard of a modern concrete building. This was the farm my driver had talked about. We dismounted, and he led me through a smart, well-appointed hall with a display of boxes and jars of pharmaceutical products made from snakes and bears, and into a long room where snakes lay around in glass cages. A few sightseers were peering at them through the glass. 'These are five-pace snakes,' said my driver, pointing out the markings on their skin.

'Well, there aren't many left!' he laughed. 'I mean, snakes are good money if you can catch them, and as long as no one sees you, it's fine. But you won't find any bears around here, at least in the wild. There's a farm down the road where they rear them for their bile.'

In an inner courtyard, a viewing gallery had been constructed above a deep concrete chamber, where three enormous black bears shambled around. Tourists were invited to buy whole cucumbers and steamed buns to feed them. The bears reared up on their hind legs to catch the food. This was not the kind of place where foreigners were normally welcome. The rearing of bears for their bile is a sensitive subject: the medicinal bile is drained from the gall bladders of live animals, and animal rights activists regard it as an abomination. I half-expected to have my way barred, or to be thrown out by an officious manager. But nobody stopped me, and the staff members who caught sight of me were shy with surprise. Was this where Mrs Liu sourced her bear's paws for high officials' tables, I wondered.

I desire fish, and I desire bear's paw; but if I may not have them both, I will forsake the fish and have only the bear's paw. I desire life, and I desire righteousness; if I may not have them both, I will forsake my life and choose righteousness.

There has always been an appetite in China for rare culinary exotica. Bear's paw was a courtly delicacy in the Warring States period; until then only emperors were allowed to touch it. One early Han Dynasty text refers to a primitive 'red-braised bear's paw', cooked with medicinal peony root and fermented sauce. And nearly two and a half millennia ago, the Confucian philosopher Mencius used it as an allegory for virtue in a disquisition on the inherent goodness of human nature:

Bear's paw was only one in a pantheon of ancient delicacies that included owl, jackal and leopard foetus. Later, more modern exotica like shark's fin and bird's nest (the dried nests of swifts, made from their saliva, which are eaten in soup) attained the highest culinary status. The first written mention of bird's nest as an ingredient is in a Yuan Dynasty text; shark's fin was eaten widely from the Ming. Both were among the indispensible luxuries of the Qing Dynasty court.

Although leopard's foetus appears to have gone out of fashion, many rare and exotic ingredients are still widely eaten by the rich and privileged in China, or they were until very recently. One cookery book in my collection, a compendium of state banquet recipes published in the mid-eighties, includes lavish colour plates of the famous delicacies served to national leaders and foreign dignitaries. And there, among the shark's fin, bird's nest and abalone, is a photograph of a hairy black bear's paw arranged on a ruched tablecloth, next to a dish bearing another, red-braised, paw, with an elaborate vegetable sculpture in the background.

One book of recipes for the fabled Man-Han imperial banquet makes for eye-popping reading, even for me. Not only does it tell readers how to prepare well-known extreme delicacies like sheep tendons, shark's lip, camel's hump, deer penis, bear's paw and the ovarian fat of the Chinese forest frog, it includes a recipe for dried orangutan lips. And this book was published in 2002! Fortunately, in a gesture to emerging environmental concerns, it offers readers the alternative of cooking deer lips in a similar sauce, and of using skin-on mutton squashed into a paw-shaped mould as a substitute for bear's paw. (A note at the foot of the real bear's paw recipe reminds them that bears are a National Grade Two Protected Species, and may not be served at dinner without official approval.)

Theoretically, much of the appeal of these rare delicacies lies in their tonic properties, and their luxurious mouthfeels. Shark's fin, for example, is rich in protein, contains some minerals, and is thought to combat arterioschlerosis; it is also prized for its strandy silkiness in the mouth, and its gelatinous bite. Bird's nest has a pleasantly slithery crunchiness and contains several minerals, as well as glycine: it is one of the most important yin tonics in Chinese medicine. The ovarian fat of forest frogs is a snow-white cloud of diaphanous slipperiness. Other banquet ingredients such as bear's paw and camel's hump, and presumably dried orangutan lips, subside, after a long, slow cooking, into smooth, soothing, rubbery waves.

Yet however much one pontificates about their nutritional benefits, or waxes lyrical about their textures, in the end, one has to admit that much of their appeal lies in their snob value. After all, a simple pig's foot or a bit of seaweed would be just as rubbery, and just as rich in nutrients. As the editor of one food magazine told me, 'People want to eat delicacies like shark's fin just because they are rare and expensive, and because they are the kind of thing emperors used to eat!'

Food and drink are at the heart of Chinese social relationships. Plying friends and business associates with expensive delicacies not only shows respect and conviviality, it also binds them into a web of mutual back-slapping (or guan xi) that might last for decades. Serve a whole shark's fin at a feast, and your guests will know that you are a person of substance. Offer one to an influential official and, with a bit of luck, he or she will feel sufficiently indebted to remember you for future favours. The exchange of fine foods is well established as a system of subtle bribery.

In the past, one imagines, when bears ran wild in the Fujianese mountains, sea cucumbers wriggled in vast numbers in the East China Sea, and turtles swam in lakes and streams, the traditional Chinese gourmet's penchant for eating such things wasn't too much of a problem. Only the richest and most well connected could afford them: just eating meat was a privilege. But the Chinese economic boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has put a new strain on the market for exotic animals, as the aspirational middle classes seek to join in the feast.

In the nineties, the entrepreneurs of the Special Economic Zones in the Cantonese south were the first to get rich in the wake of the Chinese economic reforms, and they revived the old art of conspicuous consumption, splashing out on exotic animals and imported brandy. Later, as business people in the rest of China caught up, they followed the Cantonese lead. Suddenly, the nouveaux riches all over China were ordering shark's-fin soup just as English footballers order magnums of Cristal champagne -- to show everyone how rich they were.

The rapacious appetite of the Chinese elite is now not only threatening wild creatures within the country's borders: it has become an international issue. The Chinese, for example, devoured almost all their own freshwater turtles some time ago; and most of those served in restaurants are farm-bred. But wild turtles are still held to be more potent in taste and tonic properties. For years they were imported from mainland Southeast Asia, until the Chinese gobbled up most of the turtles in that region too. Now they are being brought in from North America. It's a similar story with the pangolin, and the sea cucumber: sea cucumbers, commercially extinct in China, are being harvested as far afield as the Galapagos Islands.

The threat to sharks from the insatiable hunger of the Chinese market for their fins has received most international publicity, partly because of the practice of 'finning' (where fishermen reportedly slash the valuable fins off a live shark, and throw the rest of the fish back into the water, bleeding and disorientated). Shark's fin is de rigeur at Cantonese wedding banquets; half the global trade in sharks' fins is conducted in Hong Kong, where entire shops are devoted to them. The notorious traffic in fins is, however, just the tip of the iceberg, the fin of the fish. The Chinese are the world's most rapacious consumers of endangered species in general. Wild creatures from every corner of the planet fetch up in Chinese hotpots and medicinal brews.

The Chinese authorities make sporadic attempts to crack down on the illegal trade in endangered animals. The SARS crisis of 2003 lent an urgency to their efforts, because the epidemic was thought to have been caused by the virus leaping from wild civet cats (a traditional tonic food) into the general population. But it is hard to change an age-old culture of exotic eating. The officials nominally in charge of the heralded crackdowns are often those who like to slurp snake soup and turtle stew on the sly. And as for the peasants -- well, if you were a Fujianese peasant living on 2000 yuan a year, struggling to pay for your children's education and your parents' healthcare, and you saw a five-pace snake curled innocently in the bracken, what would you do?

In May 2007, a rickety wooden ship was found floating off the coast of Guangdong Province, a cross between the Marie-Celeste and a gruesome Noah's Ark. It was stacked with wooden crates in which wild animals languished, most half-dead with dehydration in the tropical sun. There were 31 pangolins, 44 leatherback turtles, nearly 2720 lizards, 1130 Brazilian turtles, and 21 bears' paws wrapped in newspaper. All of them rare and threatened creatures, they were on their way from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the dinner tables of the Cantonese south. The engine of the ship that carried them, stripped of identifying marks, had run out of power. Local news reports did not explain why its crew had abandoned such a valuable cargo.

The animals, thirteen tonnes of them, were taken into the custody of the Guangdong Wild Animal Protection Centre. 'We have received some animals,' a staff member at the centre was quoted as saying by the local media. 'We are waiting to hear from the authorities what we should do with them.' Given the appetite of Cantonese officials for rare animals, the high market-prices for such delicacies, and the corruption endemic all over China, one hopes that the creatures were allowed to remain in the protection centre rather than eaten. Mr Fox, will you take care of my poor lost chickens?

The first time I heard the phrase 'nong jia le' was on one of my earliest return visits to Chengdu, a year or so after I had finished my course at the Sichuan cooking school. My old friends Zhou Yu and Tao Ping, always a good barometer of trends in local food habits, had invited me out for dinner: 'Let's go to a nong jia le!' cried Tao Ping. I had no idea what she was talking about ('nong jia le' literally translates as 'the happiness of peasant homes', but might be rendered more loosely as something like 'place of rural good cheer').

That night at Mrs Liu's restaurant, I had sat back and sipped my tea after dinner as frogs and insects sang in the velvet darkness outside. Apart from from my moral doubts over some of the delicacies on the menu, it was the kind of place I love to find in rural China: a family business where the food is local, seasonal and freshly cooked. The kitchen was plain but spotlessly clean, the warmth of the welcome genuine. But despite its rural simplicity, of course, it owed its existence to the patronage of tourists like me. Local people, living in their gracious but dilapidated courtyard houses, growing and processing oolong tea for a living, couldn't afford to dine there. That snake soup alone had cost more than 300 yuan, a seventh of the annual per-capita income of a peasant in a poor place like this. But these days there's a growing market in China for 'rustic' eating.

The nong jia le turned out to be a kind of pseudo-rustic restaurant catering to the Marie-Antoinette tendencies of the new Chengdu middle class. We piled into Zhou Yu's small van and drove a few miles out of the city, until we spied a bamboo gateway festooned in bunting. Driving in, we pulled up outside a bamboo shelter that had been erected next to a concrete farmhouse. Several groups of people were seated at bamboo tables under the shelter, cracking open sunflower seeds with their teeth and playing Mah Jong. Some of them had already begun to eat.

Everything about the place was studiously bucolic. The sunflower seeds were served on the kind of chipped enamelled trays with stencilled flower patterns that you find in peasant homes. Raincoats made of straw and woven bamboo hats hung on the walls. We were invited to catch our own fish for dinner, in a pond by the door, and to select a live rabbit for the pot.

For a slightly older generation of urban people, the countryside is a place of bitter memories. After the chaos of the early Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards, teenagers who had gone wild in their vicious attacks on Chinese tradition and so-called 'capitalist roaders', were rusticated, en masse, to 'learn from the peasants'. For the young Red Guards, it was like a penance for the thrilling freedoms they'd enjoyed, travelling ticketless all over China to spread revolution, waving their Little Red Books at Mao in the rock-concert hysteria of Tiananmen Square.

Many were sent to remote areas where they lived in dire poverty for years. One friend of mine shared a disused storehouse in the mountains with some female friends, and had to eke a precarious living from the rocky soil. They slept on beds made from cornstalks and leaves, had no electricity or running water, and were always hungry. This friend returned to Chengdu after three years, but other, unfortunate girls married village men and were never allowed to go home, condemned for the rest of their lives to hardship and deprivation.

The younger generation to which Zhou Yu and Tao Ping belong was never forced to live the grinding life of a Chinese peasant. Newly mobile, with their private cars and vans, they have begun to see the countryside as a playground, and a refuge from the pollution and hurly burly of city life. Nong jia les have sprung up all over the country to cater for them. Some are straightforward restaurants, others tourist farms where you can stay for a few days and try your hand at digging the land, grinding soybeans for tofu, or gathering fruit. Real peasants, more accustomed to being viewed with withering disdain by urbanites than romanticised like this, must be amazed at such a turn of affairs. The more 'backward' the village, the more primitive its conditions, the more attractive it is to city-dwellers! Furthermore, city people are willing to pay good money for the kind of wild ferns and weeds that real peasants only eat if they are starving to death!

We pulled in at the most horrendous Disneyland version of rural simplicity you can possibly imagine. 'There you are!' said our driver proudly, gesturing towards a vast sprawl of covered walkways and private dining rooms, jerry-built out of wood and bamboo. My heart sank, but it was late and we were hungry. A waitress dressed in a fake peasant tunic made of flower-printed cotton led us to our private dining room. I glanced through the open doors of the other rooms as we passed. Each one framed a scene of greed and devastation. Round tables were piled with plates, bowls, claypots, miniature woks on tabletop burners. The food left on them was ruined, but unfinished, and the filmy plastic that covered each table was scattered with detritus: spat-out chicken bones, fishy fins and prawn shells, pools of spilt bai jiu spirits and beer. And around the tables, rows of red, dishevelled faces, bleary with alcohol, lolled at various angles.

Some nong jia les offer a ridiculous pastiche of rural eating. One night in northern Fujian, before we stumbled upon the delicious haven of Mrs Liu's, my Shanghai friends and I asked a taxi driver to help us find a restaurant serving local specialities. We imagined a Fujianese version of a Tuscan agriturismo, a tranquil farmhouse in a bamboo grove. Of course we should have known better. The driver's face lit up: 'Yes, I know a place, it's very rustic, you'll love it.'

The restaurant tried to spin out the illusion of farmhouse eating by making us give our order in a kitchen ante-room where fish and eels swam in tanks, 'wild' vegetables filled enormous fridges and bee larvae squirmed in the remains of their nest. But this was rustic catering on an industrial scale. After a desultory meal, we returned to our hotel, a mountain-villa complex that was a favourite among the ruling classes. That weekend it had been invaded by junketing officials who were pretending to hold a conference while savouring the pleasures of rural life. They wandered around drunkenly in the small hours, shirts untucked, shouting in the corridors, knocking randomly on the doors of our rooms. Dolled-up young women from the massage parlour in the grounds hurried to and fro, giggling.

I had hoped to find more genuine rural simplicity in southern Fujian. My path took me through Xiamen, where I stayed for a few nights on the small island of Guliangyu, just off the coast, once the home of the foreign treaty port residents. It was still clustered with colonial buildings, and home to China's largest collection of pianos -- another legacy of its cosmopolitan history. My destination, however, was not coastal Fujian, where the snakeheads run their illegal immigration rackets, and the friendly people eat sea worms in aspic with mustard sauce, sharkballs stuffed with minced pork, and all manner of delicious seafood snacks. Instead I was headed for an area near the border with Guangdong Province where the Hakka people live. The Hakka, which roughly translates as 'settler households', are traditionally the wanderers among the Han Chinese. Centuries ago, they migrated south, in several stages, from their homelands in northern China, to avoid insurrection and war. In the early years of the Qing Dynasty, many of them put down roots in the mountainous areas of Guangdong and Fujian, because others had already claimed the more fertile, low-lying lands. They became known for their preserved vegetables and robust peasant cooking. And there is one area of south-western Fujian that I had longed to visit for years, where the Hakka clans still dwell in their ancestral clanhouses.

The Lin brothers were sitting at the side of their courtyard, drinking Iron Buddha tea. They invited us to join them. Lin the Elder poured hot water from a flask into a small clay teapot, brewed the leaves for a few moments, strained the green-golden liquid into a jug, and then filled four tiny teabowls.

'Drink some tea', he told me, so I did.

The Lins are the great-great-grandsons of the wealthy tobacco farmer who built the mansion in which they still live. It's a magnificent, fairy-tale extravagance of courtyards and grey-tiled rooves, framed by mountains, overlooking the stream. Now, of course, most of the drafty halls are empty and unused; no incense burns in the ancestral shrine. But in recent years, this area has been discovered by tourists and foreign designers, attracted by its distinctive architecture, and the Lins have turned one wing of their mansion into a guesthouse. It's a simple place, with rudimentary plumbing, but I'm not sure I've ever stayed anywhere so enchanting.

Having left Xiamen by bus in the afternoon, I arrived in the village itself after darkness had fallen. It was a slow, winding drive from the nearest county town, along a hilly road littered with the aftermath of landslides. My driver was mostly silent, but whenever he answered his mobile phone he shouted into it as if his voice might otherwise be drowned out by the silence of the night. Eventually we stopped, and when I left the car I could hear the sound of water tumbling over stones. We picked our way along a path by a river, and through a gateway on to a long terrace, and then he led me through a small doorway in a great wide wall.

The Lins' grand house lies at the heart of tu lou ('earth-building') country. For more than ten centuries, until as late as the 1960s, the Hakka who migrated here constructed fortified compounds to protect their extended families from rival clans and marauding gangs. Many of the buildings are roundhouses, a little reminiscent of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. Their towering outer walls are windowless on the lower floors, punctuated only by a single, easily defended gateway. Inside, tiered galleries rise up around a courtyard, each one opening into a ring of rooms. On the ground floor are the kitchens, the wells, the chicken coops, and the ancestral shrines; on the first floor the granaries; and above them the bedrooms and living rooms. Some of the roundhouses are very small; others have room for dozens of families. Similar clan-houses are built around square or rectangular courtyards, like the Lins'. In times of conflict, the Hakka could simply barricade their gates, and hold out for months with their fresh water and eggs, their stores of grain, tea, and preserves.

The day after my arrival, I rose early, took breakfast in the courtyard, and then wandered out into the village. It was harvest time. Along the riverbanks, old women were peeling persimmons and laying them out to dry on bamboo trays. Fresh, they were fleshy and orange; after a few days they darkened and became toffee-sweet. Hisbiscus flowers also lay in the sun, shrivelled and purple, like witches' hands.

I spent the next few days exploring the clan-houses, first on foot, and then, in the surrounding valleys, by motorbike. Some had been spruced up for the new tourist trade; the majority were falling into dereliction. Like most parts of rural China, the society of the tu lou region had been hollowed out by the effects of economic reform. Almost all the young adults had migrated to the cities to work, leaving behind only the elderly and children. Courtyards that had once echoed to the sound of a dozen sizzling woks were desolate. Chickens pecked around the discarded agricultural tools and cooking pots on the ground.

On my last evening in the village, I had dinner in the Lins' courtyard, with the other two guests, a Eurasian photographer and his British-Chinese girlfriend, both visiting from Hong Kong. We chose from a printed list of Hakka specialities that the Lins had produced for their foreign visitors. They made us a soup from a whole duck simmered with tea-tree mushrooms, and stir-fried chicken with shiitake mushrooms; there was stir-fried musk-melon, and 'blood vegetable', a wild local green. The fowl were inconceivably delicious, as real farmyard birds usually are. And then we had that most famous Hakka dish, steamed belly pork with preserved mustard greens. There was far more than we could possibly eat. The elder Lin brought us a jug of a Hakka home-brew made from glutinous rice, warm and heady like cider. We lingered in the courtyard, mellow with wine, as the candles burned down.

An old crone sat on a wooden chair in one vast, empty roundhouse, overgrown with weeds, scattered with rubbish. She was shelling dried soybeans, hunched up over a bamboo tray, shaking the yellow beans out of their papery pods. She murmured in thick local dialect: too old to have studied Mandarin, she could neither speak nor understand it. In another roundhouse, two elderly men in blue Mao suits showed me around. They had resurrected their family shrine, retrieving the wooden statues of their ancestors from their Cultural Revolution hidey-hole. Their clothes were worn and they looked at me eagerly, hoping for a tip. In the late afternoon, I came across a small, grubby boy wandering around with a ricebowl and chopsticks, eating a supper of noodles without meat or relish.

At the entrance to the roundhouse next door, he discussed prices with two elderly men. One of them, frail and dignified in his threadbare Mao suit, ended up coming to a deal, and then walked home, clutching his purchase, unwrapped, in his hand. It was a single pork bone, a small one, with a knuckle at one end, to which clung a few ragged shreds of meat.

I thought back to the vulgar extravagance of the nong jia le in northern Fujian, and the easy abundance of our 'rustic' dinner the night before -- the plentiful dishes of duck and chicken, the steamed pork that we had barely touched -- and my heart stuck in my throat. Then the man disappeared from view as he descended the stony path by the riverside, and the younger Lin brother arrived on his motorbike to take me to my bus.

The next day I had to catch the early bus back to Xiamen. As I waited in the courtyard for my lift to the bus stop, the local butcher was doing his rounds. A slight, scruffy man bearing two bamboo trays on a bamboo shoulderpole, he shouted out 'Meat-for-sale! Meat-for-sale! Mai rou! Mai rou!' He paused in the gateway, and I caught a glimpse of his wares. He didn't have much to sell, just a few rather mean-looking hunks of pork, and some bones.