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It’s the scale of China that punches you in the face.

I have been in Wuhan for 18 hours or so and I’m on my way back to the airport.

The Hongshan Hotel is an old and grand five star hotel in the centre of the city.

There are pictures of Chairman Mao on the wall in the room where you have lunch , he used to stay there and enjoy it. The lunch is another explosion of new culture, screaming at me in the midst of a professional meeting when I’m trying to be polite and understand what people are saying and give the right answers and not look like a d**k.

The table is circular in the middle and the food passes around. They offer me Wuhan fish, it’s a real delicacy. Most of the fish in China seems to be cooked whole with the head and tail in tact. You pick out part of the fish, which is beautifully cooked, bones and all, and eat it and spit the bones back onto your plate – although it seems most of the people just chew and eat most of the bones. To me, to us, eating fish bones seems like an accident waiting to happen but it’s different here.  

I am wary of the food after the hot pod last night but I must be polite and I must try everything, that’s why I came after all.

The people are kind and their words are kind but I think that the lecture was s**t so I’m a bit flat and a bit low as I go to get changed out of my suit into my scraggy clothes and head for yet another car (they use the most amazing apps to book cars here, the most amazing apps to pay and the most amazing apps to communicate)

I thought they were behind, but in this type of thing they’re way, way ahead.

So we’re in the car leaving Wuhan and the sun is going down. There are a billion things I could tell you to describe how big this place is, and I don’t mean in land mass and size, I mean population and growth – but try this.

It’s 30 storeys high and five or six apartments across at the front, some of them are two apartments deep but many of them are five apartments deep. That means there are between 300 and 750 apartments in each block.

That’s a pretty big block.

It’s much bigger than Eastern View, which was the block of flats at the bottom of the hill in Gourock where I grew up! It was maybe half the size at best.

But there are 12 of these apartment plots in a block. Then there is another block, another block of 12. Then there is another block. Then there are another hundred blocks of 12.

Then the blocks go on almost all the way to the airport.

After a while you become numb to the size, to the scale. It’s an exponential increase on what you’re used to.

There were blocks like this going into Shaghai and blocks like that going out in the other direction. There were blocks going in and out of Hangzhou and into Qingdao (not quite so many there)

Then in Beijing, they’re everywhere.

China has hundreds of cities, multiples of times bigger than anywhere you’ve seen (unless you’ve been to China) but Shanghai and Beijing alone have a bigger population than the UK and both of them occupy sites of land much smaller than that of London, 30 million in Beijing and 25 million in Shanghai.

On Friday I lectured at Hangzhou stomatology hospital, which is one of the biggest dental hospitals in China. They place 10,000 implants per year in that hospital.

I saw the stock cupboard… s**t! They probably had more stock than Straumann UK.

It’s not a question of whether the Chinese are coming, the Chinese are here. It’s just that we’re going and we’re just a blot on their landscape, somewhere way over there.

Blog Post Number: 1800