After sitting on my hands for a while, my arms became dead.

After a drive of nearly ten hours, through small villages of thatched houses built on stilts, we stop on the last hairpin bend halfway down the mountain. Below, brilliant green and glistening wet, lies Xishuangbanna, in China’s southernmost valley.

The web-page took a long time to load and errored out.

The episode began by a telephone ring in the morning and the voice of Algernon Mailey at the far end of the wire.