* There are about six million Yi, a people who have high-bridged noses, speak a Tibeto-Burman language with a crude phonetic script and are generally farmers and hunters. They dress colourfully, make much use of felt – unwoven cloth, in which the fibres are pressed together – in their dress and shelters, and hunt with poisoned arrows. Unlike some other minorities, they never had their feet bound. They are also known as the Lolo, and are divided into two castes, the White Bones and the Black Bones – the latter, less numerous, once making up a Yi ruling aristocracy.

* Other buses had enormous black rubber bladders covering the entire roof: these were filled with natural gas, the cheapest fuel available locally.

* They were recognized very swiftly, however, by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who bought a controlling interest in Star TV soon after its creation and now has ambitious plans for increasing the reach of his various news and entertainment organizations into this immense potential market. One of his early decisions, which sparked some anger, was to drop BBC World Service News: the Chinese, whose favours he sought, found it unpalatable, preferring their viewers to exist on a diet of music and old films, which Murdoch's managers were more than happy to supply.

* Of thirty-five – one of whom had bound feet.

* He was held hostage for several months, a victim of the turbulent politics of the region.

* Suicide turned out not to be a Chinese monopoly, by any means. A combination of alienation, loneliness and stress had already driven a significant number of the bachelor expatriates mad: only the week before, one engineer had taken a room at the Nan Shan Hotel in Panzhihua, attacked staff with a carving knife and then thrown himself to his death out of a tenth-floor window.

* Once for singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' in his sleep.

* Or bronchitis, if it is taken with grease from a boiled-up mountain bear.