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A tall grey-haired Englishman could not suddenly turn up in a remote village and begin to ask personal family questions. The second major issue was that of access to such a community. Although B was familiar with Putonghua (Standard Mandarin), in the southwest Province of Sichuan the provincial dialect ( Sichuanhua) was generally used, but in the remote villages, the dialect was even more distinct from Sichuanhua.

This presented some major challenges the foremost of which was that of language. B wanted to draw upon family histories with their traditions and stories to explore how peasant families relate their own stories of change. Several ethnographies of Chinese rural communities have been written in recent years looking at the transformation in the way of life and values in rural China (Ruf, 1998 Oxfeld, 2010 Steinmuller, 2015). Chinese statistics reveal the amazing reduction in poverty that has taken place in China, but B was interested to study how this had occurred in the lives of the poorest communities in rural areas. B was working at the university with small teams of graduate students undertaking anthropological research for their MA studies. At the time, A was a member of staff planning to study for a research degree in London and B was a visiting professor from the UK.

Two scholars, one Chinese and the other English first met whilst they were both working at the same university in the west of China.

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