IF YOU ever happen to find yourself in a men's toilet in deepest China and you see a man hurriedly devouring a tin of sardines with a pocket knife, that will be my friend the iron and steel trader. He's not crazy. Far from it: he regularly negotiates and signs multi-million dollar deals with Chinese steel mills on behalf of the South African company that sends him to some of the most ghastly places on earth.
This businessman spends a major part of his time in China and has every reason to believe his company thinks highly of him. So what's with this eating of sardines (canned Norwegian smoked sardines in oil, to be precise) in a loo? 'I always travel with them in my briefcase. They're the secret to surviving Mao Tai wine,' he says. 'I don't know why it works but I've found it definitely neutralises the terrible effect of this lethal drink which is half rocket fuel and half embalming fluid.' Writer and television personality Clive James, while covering Maggie Thatcher's trip to China in 1982 (the one when she fell down the stairs of The Great Hall of the People) described the effects of drinking China's prestige tipple as similar to putting your head into the dark interior of a musty wardrobe and asking a friend to slam the door on it, very hard. When I first ordered it out of curiosity (the drinks list described it as Chinese white wine, bai jiu, the generic term for all clear Chinese wines which are not wines at all but spirits) my nose noticed its arrival from 20 metres away.
My friend the iron and steel man was born and bred within falling over distance of a tequila distillery, and in northern China he has actually traded on his ability to knock back whatever is put before him. 'I'm a famous drinker up there. I go up and file them down, that's the way business gets done. One guy bet me that if I drank six of these Mao Tai things in a row he'd buy an extra 100,000 tonnes of iron ore from me. He kept his word. We altered the contract the next day. At another banquet, another guy did the same, but only bet five glasses.' To which he adds with a sigh: 'Being on the banquet circuit is tough, three weeks at a time, you have to be very careful. We nearly lost a guy once, he nearly died. Alcohol poisoning.' There are many ways to die. One is 'death by duck' and it's more lingering than a bullet in the back of the neck or the devastating effects of fermented sorghum. It is caused by a sudden, excessive ingestion of fat and normally occurs in people who tend to eat cottage cheese and salad every day. The fact remains that eating is a fundamental part of the process called Doing Business with Chinese Characteristics. And in order to stay alive the rules must be obeyed.
Rule 1: Never, ever say 'mmmmm, yummy', even if it is. You'll get it again for the remainder of your trip - breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you're being truthful and really do like it, that's not so bad, but if you've lied, pretending you like dog as much as the next man, dog is what you'll get for the rest of the trip.
'Chinese officials use the banquet with the foreigner as a way to eat all this weird expensive stuff they don't normally get to eat: bears' paws, giant bumble bees, locusts, scorpions, slugs, camel hump. They really think it's something,' the iron and steel man says.
He cast his mind back. 'One banquet still holds the record. Through our blurred vision we each counted different figures but we averaged out at 52 courses; they just kept bringing them in,' he says.
'I was at one banquet where they served the ears, the nose, the tongue, the tendons, the balls, the penis and the tail of a bull. Where the rest of that bull was, I don't know.' Rule 2: If the dish is 'good for you', it's likely to be slippery, unappetising in appearance, expensive, and something you'd rather not know about.