This is what time travel must be like. I'm standing on a narrow street in Chengdu, capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan. I first came here in 1985 and memories of that visit are so vivid they compete with reality.

It's a fresh day in the early spring of 1985. The street is lined by two-storey houses made of timber and roofed with curved, grey tiles; their walls are painted a sober brown. The shop signs mostly date from the anti-capitalist 1970s: black characters on a white background. A few brighter, hand-painted ones show glimmerings of entrepreneurship, now that the Government is encouraging market forces.

LRB 13 December 2001 | PDF Download