THERE were a Pakistani, an Englishman and a Uigur . . . It sounds like the start of an appalling joke, but this happens to be real. I was the Englishman, the Pakistani was a trader in birds of prey, and the Uigur - a member of the main Turkic minority living in China's northwestern Xinjiang region - was the owner of the restaurant in which we were sitting.
If the sagging jaws and popping eyes of the Chinese customers in that restaurant were anything to go by, this unlikely triumvirate, huddled around a little table next to the kitchen, made quite a remarkable sight.
The Uigur, the fact that he was a citizen of the People's Republic of China notwithstanding, looked just like my granddad, who was born, bred, worked and died in Bristol, half a globe away.
The Pakistani looked like a young Omar Sharif; clearly he was making a very good living buying birds of prey in Xinjiang, humping them across the border into Pakistan, and then re-selling them to Saudi businessmen with an image problem.
He was busy telling me what a good living he made from it. One of the strangest things about this three-way conversation was that each of us spoke two of the necessary languages, but there was no common language.
I could speak to the Pakistani in English and to the Uigur in Chinese. The Pakistani and the Uigur could communicate in Uigur. So at any one time two people could talk, after which one would have to translate the conversation to the third who had been left out.
It was an interesting example of international togetherness, or perhaps in this remote Chinese border region far from the national capital, a united fraternity against the unpopular Han Chinese.