Beauty past and present

It is Sunday morning in Chishui old town and the market is in full swing. Despite the slight rain, the narrow main street is packed. In front of us walks an elderly Chinese woman, sporting a traditional wide-brimmed straw hat and a packed, back-slung basket.

She could have decamped from any of the region's growing number of Red Army museums. Behind her runs her grandson, clutching a deformed Transformer toy, with an arm missing and its battery pack gaping.

In the "Big Boy's Book of Travel Cliches", depicting China as the old jostling with the new is right up there with observations about the vagaries of the British climate or the Russian love for vodka.