It was a teenage girl with Cleopatraesque black hair; tight jeans and a tie dyed T-shirt cut off to show her stud-pierced navel.

Away to the south-west ran the French Concession, its tree-lined avenues gashes of green through the grey roofs. Between it and the river lay the misshapen circle of the old Chinese City of Nantao, the city wall long since gone,¹ the narrow, stone streets now clean of the beggars, pimps and street-hawkers that used to infest its gloom.

This was the relation of the order of virgins to the Church from the latter part of the fourth to the beginning of the seventh century. The modern “sister” had no exact prototype in the Church of the first seven centuries.

The arrangement indicates that the series of six pictures is to be read boustrophedonally, beginning at the lower right:[…]