Scorpion City by Sean Thomas

Owls, crows, de-quilled porcupines, rats, beavers, miserable-looking squirrels, half-dead vultures, bears, mice, dace, twitching lobsters, snakes sliced in half from tongue to tail with their tiny pink hearts still beating and bloody - you name it, in Guangzhou’s huge, smelly, wet, weird, noisy, thronging Qingping market, you can buy it, and you can eat it.

Qingping was established by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 as part of his drive to liberalise China, and in that short time it has become China’s largest and most celebrated market. It is especially favoured for its food. All the evidence of China’s long culinary acquaintance with anything that walks, wags, slithers or squeals is here; nothing is sacred. A few yards beyond the place where men bash carp on the head and cut them open alive for the benefit of dubious housewives, you come to what you think is a rather neglectful pet store - until you realise that the cats stuffed into boxes are being sold for someone’s supper, as are the dogs in wicker cages, the hamsters in old crates, the sad green turtles in rubber tubs, the distraught frogs in plastic pails and the songbirds plaintively twittering from every metal awning.

Most astonishing are the scorpions. At the end of the main drag of Qingping we came across a group of guys gathered around a shallow bowl full of scuttling little scorpions. In sign language and non-existent Cantonese we asked the owner what they were for - pets? Toys? Joke gifts? The scorpion-seller gave us and our camera an old-fashioned look and then he laughed and picked one of the scorpions by the stinger and dangled it over his mouth. Of course. They were for eating. Live. Whole. What else?

We’d had enough. Grabbing our bags and kit we headed west along the Embankment of the sludgy great Pearl River: the lifeline and raison d'etre of Guangzhou, the city the West used to know as Canton.

Guangzhou is China’s most southerly large city, its fourth biggest conurbation and it is still, as it has always been, China's most cosmopolitan port, its principal opening to the outside world. Guangzhou is China’s orifice, its mouth, its cloaca. The cosmopolitan nature of Guangzhou is partly due to the character of the Cantonese themselves: vivacious, aggressive, dynamic, quick-witted - in contrast to the more aloof Mandarin-speakers from Beijing. But the approachable ambience of Guangzhou is also no doubt due to the proximity of the western outposts of Macau and Hong Kong, a hundred miles down the delta.

The air of subtropical ease and comparative openness that pervades Guangzhou does not however make it any less alien to the intruding occidental, the impertinent 'gwailo'. There may have been Romans here since the 2nd century AD, Indians since the 3rd, and Arabs since the 6th, but this is still China, one of the least globalised places on the planet. Four hundred yards from Qingping there are banyan-treed, open-sewered, iron-balconied side streets where a round-eyed westerner is the cause of loud merriment and some consternation. Children run out to pinch you. The middle-aged ladies having their hair washed in the streets look up and stare. Old men nearly topple from their bicycles as they twist in their saddles to gawp.

Our destination was Yuexiu Park, across town. It took about three hours to travel five miles - a simple lesson in the price China is paying for economic deregulation. The traffic is horrendous, likewise the pollution. Everywhere you look great big skyscrapers are shooting up in their bamboo scaffolding next to sixth century Buddhist temples. New Macdonalds franchises stand by one-room hovels devoid of running water. Peasants in conical straw hats wait to cross the thundering freeways behind willowy city girls in fake Chanel blazers. The noise from the blaring loudspeakers might be Canto-pop rather than hectoring Trotskyite slogans, but the narrow red and lilac flags of Maoism still flutter above the many building sites.

Amidst this chaos, the heady turbulence, Yuexiu Park is a relative oasis. It’s scruffy and a bit down-at-heel but the lakes and gardens are pleasant enough, and there are at least two historical sites worth the detour: the Sun Yat Sen Memorial, and Zhenhai Tower. Sun Yat Sen was a revolutionary before the Revolution, a precursor of Mao, and Guangzhou was his homeland. The obelisk in the middle of the park marking the spot where the young Sun Yat enjoyed his sandwiches is impressive; but more impressive is the later history of this remarkable man. In the 1920s this doctor from Cuiheng village, west of Guangzhou, was a principal in the rebellion that saw off China’s last imperial dynasty, the dope-addled Qing. Hence Sun Yat Sen’s status as a communist saint.

The other interesting site in Yuexiu Park is historically related to the Sun Yat Sen memorial - indeed it explains why the doctor got the breaks he did, politically speaking. This is the ancient Zhenhai tower, the only part of the old city walls still standing. From the top of Zhenhai there are agreeable views of the White Cloud hills to the north and the Japanese banks to the east. Zhenhai’s modern significance is that it was occupied by British troops during the mid-nineteenth century Opium Wars, that extraordinary exercise in gunboat drug-trafficking when Britain loitered at the schoolgates of China in mirror-shades and Rolex, forcing the Qing Emperors to accept huge consignments of Bengalese opium in return for China's silks, spices and tea.

The Opium Wars had two main results. The first was that the Chinese became an enfeebled nation of smack-heads; the second was that we Brits and our western hangers-on made some serious drug money. For evidence of quite how lucrative Britain's dope-peddling was you don't have to go as far as the heroinopolis of Hong Kong. Guangzhou itself has one fascinating western enclave: Shamian island, just south of Qingping market, developed by westerners immediately after the Opium Wars. If you are staying in Guangzhou for any length of time Shamian Island will probably be your base: the island’s converted townhouses, churches and mansions make very pleasant hotels and restaurants.

A couple of days in the exhilarating squalor of Guangzhou can make one feel the overwhelming urge to go somewhere very different, very quickly. This can swiftly be arranged by train, bus or plane, destination Macau or Hong Kong, but more interesting is the night ferry from Zhoutouzui Wharf in West Guangzhou, which departs every evening at 9pm and voyages down the Pearl River.

For a foreign devil, taking a ride on this boat is easy: it's very cheap and the bureaucracy that attends leaving China proper is surprisingly light - a cursory check of your passport and an idle once-over by Customs. For the native Chinese, however, it is not so simple: they are searched and grilled and scrutinized and interrogated, presumably to ensure they are not doing a midnight flit from the People's Republic.

The trip down the old Pearl River was itself uneventful. The sun set early, so we didn't see much apart from the lights of fishing villages, and the lamps of passing shipping. Across the delta came weird smells, the strange, unmistakable whiff of sewage mixed with coconut and oil, incense and diesel. The palm trees on the shore rustled in the subtropical breeze. In the ships’ dormitories old men hawked and spat and spread Chinese ‘flu. We slept well. The night passed.

In the morning, everything was different. We rose, washed, and went to the bar for our complimentary tea. Our bags packed, we climbed the gangway onto the gloomy deck. To the east was the glimmer of early dawn and to the north, the vastness of China; directly in front were Kowloon and Hong Kong. At night Hong Kong Harbour is an extraordinary sight: a wall of neon, a cliff-face of soaring skyscrapers, twenty-storey condominiums, gleaming banks, brand-new flyovers and endless pillars of brightly-lit apartment blocks that march across the mountains like some gigantic parade. A parade to the Victory of Capitalism.