Shelf life

Keith Gaston is 8,000 kilometres from home in a remote corner of China, three hours' drive from the North Korean border - but the Briton smiles happily as he shovels packets of digestive biscuits and cream crackers into a shopping basket.

"It's wonderful," says the 62-year-old from Basingstoke, southern England. As far as he knows, he is the only British expatriate living in the bleak and grimy industrial city of Fushun, Liaoning province. "I couldn't believe it when Tesco opened a branch out here."

The seven-storey mall - two floors of Tesco groceries and goods ranging from children's toys to motorbikes, and five floors of shop space leased by the British supermarket chain to other retailers - is less than a mile from the home Gaston shares with his Chinese wife.

For the mining industry executive, it has brought home comforts to a largely alien environment where winter temperatures plunge to minus 20 degrees Celsius and the most celebrated denizen was the Mao-era model soldier Lei Feng, who died here in 1962.

"All of a sudden I can get things I haven't been able to buy since I came to China 10 years ago, like baked beans," he says. "Every time I come here, I buy up their entire stock of digestive biscuits, which, admittedly, is usually only about 10 packets."

Unsurprisingly, most of the other groceries in the Fushun Tesco are aimed squarely at the local population of two million. At the fresh fish counter, three aisles from the tiny imported food section where Gaston buys his biscuits, more typically Chinese fare is on sale.

"Would you like these skinned and chopped up?" a white-coated shop assistant asks cheerfully as I pick out two palm-sized live bullfrogs, priced at 15 yuan (HK$18.50) each, from a tank. When I decline, the frogs are handed to me live, in a tied-up plastic bag that hops erratically around my shopping basket all the way to the checkout. Guilt-racked, I later release them to an uncertain future on a polluted riverbank.