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Stephen McCarty

“If you go down to the Sichuan woods, you’re sure of a big surprise…”
No, it is not a new species, exactly; but you might chance upon a famous British TV presenter seemingly cosplaying – as a giant panda.
This unsettling mise-en-scène occurs during Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure, available on Now TV, at the Shenshuping Panda Base, a remote, government-run wildlife unit in Wolong, Sichuan province, where pandas are born and raised before being released to repopulate the mountains.
Trouble is, the cubs cannot be allowed a glimpse of a human face, lest they become too trusting of the world’s most dangerous species. So Fogle and his three-strong film crew must dress up in full-length panda costumes for their encounter.
Looking like bank robbers at a fancy-dress party thrown by The Joker, they set off to engage with China’s cuddliest, most venerated beast – appropriate for Fogle’s quest during the three-episode miniseries to discover whether the “timeless ways of the past”, as he puts it, can endure “as China races towards the future”.
Fogle’s 8,000-kilometre (4,970-mile) odyssey, much of it undertaken by high-speed train, begins with him as a bricklayer – albeit a “brickie” relaying some of the world’s most celebrated bricks. On the Great Wall north of Beijing he helps with preservation work on another symbol of China that his new boss says is in the hearts and minds of all Chinese people. This too chimes with his mission to “get to know the ‘real’ China”, cliché or not.
Did he find it?
“I don’t say this lightly, but yes,” he tells the South China Morning Post from London. “I think my series transcends stereotypes and delves much deeper than many other travelogues.”
It was, he adds, “a journey to meet the people; a journey of people and places” on which peering behind those stereotypes was “surprisingly easy. Almost everything I saw and experienced was the opposite of what I expected. I wanted to go beyond the lazy headlines.”

‘The future’ in Shenzhen, ‘appalling’ Hong Kong coffin homes
A Fogle series hallmark is his intuitive understanding of the lives of many of the people he comes across. In Beijing, this finds expression in a park, where he joins a troupe of dancing grannies who gather for a dose of loneliness-beating social interaction; and in Shanghai, where he sets out on a precariously laden electric bicycle to sample the punishing daily grind of a nonetheless cheerful parcel-delivery migrant worker.
“As a prolific traveller, I have always found that if you show open-minded warmth, you will be rewarded in kind,” he says. “Many Chinese are wary because of their international reputation, but I have always tried to focus on the positive side – and I found a warm, kind, curious community.”
A shameful shock to Fogle’s sympathetic system, however, occurred where he perhaps least expected it. Having ventured south to Hong Kong, he was confronted by the grim reality of Sham Shui Po’s “coffin homes”, scarcely believing the rudimentary living conditions of their vulnerable residents – or the rents charged.
“It was shocking,” he says ruefully. “We have housing crises around the world, but the cost of those tiny ‘coffin homes’ was appalling. To be honest, Hong Kong felt rather old-fashioned by comparison [to mainland China].” He immediately brings up the neighbour that looms ever larger: “Shenzhen seemed to be light years ahead.”
What he calls “the city of the future” has left a deep impression on Fogle.
“The robots are coming and China will be the gateway,” he says, reflecting on time spent among the city’s technology entrepreneurs. In the series, marvelling at “the beginning of a whole new age”, he realises that a dexterous, automated coffee barista, more flexible than a Cirque du Soleil gymnast, is simply “everyday stuff” in Shenzhen.
I was fascinated by the cormorant fisherman. A dying, traditional skill being saved by TikTok
Ben Fogle
Fogle also happily subjects himself to the ignominy of dancing with, and being outperformed by, EngineAI’s humanoid prototype robot PM01, designed, says one of its creators, for possible industrial, domestic and educational use – although it has already been enlisted by the Shenzhen police. RoboCop, indeed.
“I’ve seen the future,” is Fogle’s assessment of China’s technological revolution, but, as throughout the series, he remains mindful of whether the country’s “ancient traditions, customs and beliefs” can survive.
“The speed of progress is astonishing and nothing would surprise me,” he says, perhaps torn between all the dazzling advancement and his experience of amateur Chinese opera, tai chi and the serenity of Sichuan’s Mount Qingcheng.
“Almost every nation struggles with the complexity of holding onto their past while adapting to the future, and for an ancient civilisation like China’s it is particularly hard,” he says.
“I saw the future of China on the rice terraces of Guangxi, where people are migrating to the cities, and in Shenzhen, where the working population is flocking to join the AI-technology boom.”

For Fogle, the dichotomy is encapsulated best in an ironic scenario he witnessed near Guilin. He joined a cormorant fisherman on his bamboo raft on the Li River for a demonstration of his venerable art, but quickly realised the whole episode was a performance being kept alive by tourism.
“I was fascinated by the cormorant fisherman,” he says, on reflection. “A dying, traditional skill being saved by TikTok. It was all smoke and mirrors done for photos and video, because the rivers are too polluted to sustain fish stocks. There are so many metaphors in that story.”
Welcome to China.
All episodes of Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure are streaming on Now TV


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Why Ben Fogle thinks he discovered the ‘real’ China in new TV series

British presenter Ben Fogle meets a cormorant fisherman in Guilin. Photo: All3Media

British TV presenter Ben Fogle is pictured with the giant panda costumes he and his team wore in Sichuan, China, as part of his TV show, Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure. Photo: All3Media

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Fogle meets a cormorant fisherman in Guilin for Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure. Photo: All3Media

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A visitor takes a photo of a giant panda at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, China. Photo: The Korea Times

Giant panda structures welcome travellers at the Chengdu Tianfu International Airport in China. Photo: The Korea Times

Panda-themed souvenirs at a traditional teahouse in Chengdu. Experts estimate that panda-themed tourism and merchandise in Sichuan constitute a business worth 1 billion yuan annually. Photo: The Korea Times

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In Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure, the TV presenter ‘transcends stereotypes’ as he travels from the Great Wall to Shenzhen and Hong Kong


In Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure, the TV presenter ‘transcends stereotypes’ as he travels from the Great Wall to Shenzhen and Hong Kong.


Why Ben Fogle thinks he discovered the ‘real’ China in new TV series

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}In Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure, the TV presenter ‘transcends stereotypes’ as he travels from the Great Wall to Shenzhen and Hong Kong

In Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure, the TV presenter ‘transcends stereotypes’ as he travels from the Great Wall to Shenzhen and Hong Kong