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       A TREE MAY GROW TO A THOUSAND FEET, BUT THE LEAVES STILL RETURN TO THEIR ROOTS

       ‘Wanderers eventually return to their native soil.’

      —The Story of a Marital Fate to Awaken the World, an unattributed Qing Dynasty novel

      Behind the Forbidden City stands a hill, which – legend has it – hides a vast reserve of coal for use in times of siege. Each morning, just before dawn, people gather in the park below the hill for exercises. A group of women practise swordplay with their arms outstretched and blades held upright, turning on one heel. An older man shambles past with a battered canvas bag, half running, half walking, towards his usual spot among the flowerpots by the dragon-claw scholar-trees. There he fills a bucket with water, dips in a long brush, and silently practises calligraphy, writing with long, flowing brushstrokes in the dust on the paving stones at his feet. All around, hidden among the bushes, the exercisers stretch and bend and shout to greet the dawn.

      I often looked out from the hill as the first rays of sunlight struck the corner watchtowers on the Forbidden City below. In the 1980s it was easy to imagine that Beijing had hardly changed since imperial times. Around the palace complex with its maze of pavilions and passageways, the sloping roofs of a thousand courtyard houses stretched out flat towards the horizon. In the late springtime, a thin layer of mist would trap the smell of fresh leaves in the damp air hanging in the alleyways. Towards the end of the summer, in the main Party compound beside the Forbidden City, lotus flowers poked through the greenery that floated about on the lakes; crooked pathways ran over little stone bridges between the pavilions along the banks. Back then, there was something about Beijing that felt simple and content; the city ran in a daily routine where everything had its own allotted place and a clear role in life. There was a pattern to the day in the old hutong alleyways, a rhythm to the hours and seasons, a closeness to nature that felt unusual in the midst of such a vast city. Up on the hill, it seemed as if the odd honk of a passing Liberation Truck was the only reminder of the turning of the centuries. But when I looked more closely through the haze towards the west, I could pick out the vague and distant outline of factories standing out against the mountainsides. Smokestacks and towers of twisted pipework rose up at the foot of the hills. A trail of smoke drifted from an iron foundry. In the other direction, heaps of coal and ash marked the site of the city’s main power station and electrical towers marched off in straight lines towards the south. These were all the early signs of modernization and in those days, I never gave it a thought. But if you were to go back to that hill and look out over the great city today, you would find a very different sight.

      I first arrived in Asia in the eighties after I was posted to Hong Kong from London. I’d never been there before, and from the moment I stepped from the plane and through the wall of dense wet heat, I knew I was in a different world. Giant Chinese characters shone in neon lights from the tops of ten-storey buildings. Wherever I looked, there were people hammering in tiny factories, unloading from boats, bargaining in alleyways. Office workers sat crammed into dumpling restaurants between stacks of bamboo steamers. The streets reeked of dried seafood and Chinese medicine and the air was filled with the honking of taxis and clattering of trams. I had no idea that such a concentration of human life could exist in such a state of perpetual motion. The intensity of life in Hong Kong was something completely new to me. Almost immediately, I felt drawn to China.

      The following year, I quit Hong Kong and found a place at a university in Beijing to learn Mandarin. It was the year after the tanks had rumbled onto Tiananmen Square and there were almost no other foreigners around. At first the students there sought me out to practise their English, ignoring the bizarre rules about ‘spiritual pollution’ that were meant to keep us apart. But their English was so good that I felt awkward speaking Mandarin with them, and so I started spending more time away from the university, in places where people knew nothing of foreigners. After a while, I could manage simple conversations and slowly grew to recognize the Chinese characters on the shop signs and the notices around me. I found my way more easily through the tangled network of old hutong alleyways that spread around the old imperial buildings at the centre of the city. I often went back to Coal Hill to find the calligraphy man practising his characters with his water brush on the dusty paving. He would write out characters on the stones at his feet while I tried to catch the meaning of the flowing brushstrokes before they began to fade and disappear.

      My student days were short-lived and I soon joined an investment firm run by a Wall Street veteran who was building the first large foreign direct investment business in China. Over the period of a few years, he’d raised $400 million and pumped it into twenty factories across China, ending up with nearly twenty-five thousand employees.

      The speed of China’s development in those years was difficult to take in; around the Yangtse and Pearl River deltas, shiny new cities rose up out of marshlands in just a few months. Little fishing villages became gigantic container ports, hydroelectric dams choked mighty rivers, and four-lane superhighways were blasted through rock faces. For more than a decade, China existed in a state of supreme upheaval. The government fought to maintain order as it embarked on a programme of massive reform, removing the props of the command economy while billions in foreign investment poured into the coastal provinces. As China awoke from a century of slumber, deep within the interior 150 million workers rose up out of the country villages like a tidal wave and swirled towards the coast.

      Many of the factories we had invested in were in remote regions of China, where central authority was weaker. ‘The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,’ goes the old provincial saying about the distant authorities in Beijing. The country is too big to be controlled from a single centre, and unless events catch the attention of Beijing, local interests can often take over. We became embroiled in unequal disputes in far-flung places. Land was transferred out of our joint ventures to prop up loans for other local businesses. Bank transfers and capital investments were made without approval, cash was stuffed into safes in back offices with no records, and contracts were routinely ignored. For a long time, it looked as though we might lose the investment.

      It took years to sort out the mess, and during that time, I travelled to almost every province in China. We had strikes and lockouts, sieges and court cases, and had been pursued across the country by officials with writs and freezing orders. But gradually, over a period of several years, the relationships with our Chinese partners smoothed out and the businesses started making money. We got better control of the assets and sales started to grow on the back of the China boom. Most of the investment was saved, together with the jobs of the twenty-five thousand workers, but after nearly seven