Questions of edibility continued to rise throughout our trip to China. If you’ve got a hankering for cuttlefish or just a hunk of hammerhead, there’s no better – or fresher, if I can add with a shudder – place to get it than Qing Ping market in Guangzhou, about an hour from Hong Kong.

Qing Ping is famous for being an exceptionally gory festival of lopped-off chicken heads, live snakes and a choice selection of other reptiles in various stages of life and death. The stores are packed tightly next to each other, permeated by a stench quite unmatched by anything I’ve smelt before, even after being left to my own devices in well-stocked kitchen.

Colourful plastic containers full to the brim with murky water and live tortoises line the pavements, while sacks of dried swordfish and sharks’ fins spill over the tables. We are invited by enthusiastic merchants to nibble on various unidentified dried goods which prove inedible to the untrained tongue.

Lots of the market has been shut down in recent years, for one or more reasons. Some cite cruelty to animals, others think that one too many tourist puked on the merchants’ shoes. It’s a shame, in a way. Cops stand on the street corners, monitoring what goes in and out. You’ve got to leave your crocodiles at home unless you want to force entry.

We’d like to stay longer but can’t – curiosity gives way to nausea. Hot and smelly, that’s what it is.