In Guilin there are tea-drinking ceremonies where you are invited to buy tea, workshops where they chop open oysters and tempt you with pearls, and tours of a government hospital where the doctors urge you to buy medicine.
The previous day, I had been dragged into the jaws of death by a cable car on the slopes of Yaoshan, the area's highest mountain. Today, two medics were using qi gong to fire electric charges into my body. Tomorrow? I shuddered to think.
I wouldn't have come to the Guilin Traditional Chinese Medical Hospital had it not been for the incident on the mountain, which had left me with a badly sprained thumb, a small price to pay when it could so easily have been my life.
A Hong Kong tour guide overheard me asking where I could buy medicine, at the Sheraton Hotel. 'We're visiting a hospital tomorrow. Come along, they will be able to help,' she promised. And so I was herded on to a bus with more than 30 Hong Kong and overseas Chinese, and surely enough the bus drove into the grounds of the hospital. We alighted at the main entrance, trooped past a pharmacy and up a couple of flights of stairs, passing doctors with files under their arms, and down a long corridor flanked by examination rooms. The group was directed into a lecture room and asked to sit on wooden forms facing wooden desks that reminded me of my days at primary school.
A doctor adjusted his white coat, mounted the dais and began a long discourse in Cantonese on the miraculous healing qualities of traditional Chinese medicines and the wonders of qi gong.
When he had finished, the group burst into applause and two more doctors, resplendent in freshly laundered white coats, burst on to the scene, jumped on to the stage, swung into kung fu-style action and then stood to attention while they were introduced.