Chengdu is the place we were staying in prior to THAT forty hour train trip. In spring, there is a whole world spelled out in the streetside vendors' produce alone.

I have to describe them to you, these springtime streetscapes, where women crouch low on footpaths, skilfully using machete-sharp blades to peel water chestnuts. Brown becomes white as the blade flickers through the nuts' flesh. Unwanted skin falls in oversized heaps, and plastic baggies are filled with the freshly nude veg. They gleam white like thighs spilling from stockings at midnight.

Companions to the water chestnut peelers are the men and women hawking berries. In wicker baskets strung between bamboo carry-poles, the berries nestle in bloody mounds of purple and red. When the vendor's white plastic scoop is drawn through the juicy heap, it emerges streaky as a steak knife.

Then there are the pineapple sellers, each of whom wears a single yellow rubber glove - the thick sort you use for washing up. The gloved hand grasps a portion of pineapple, whilst the other nicks out every hard, inedible pinhole of skin. Then, the portion's skewered with a long bamboo stick, and dunked into a large vat of clear liquid. That's where it will stay until purchased, looking like some ultra-yellow sci-fi creation made by a uni-gloved evil mastermind. Suspicious of the preserving liquid after all of China's recent food scares, we haven't tried one ...

Let me not forget the peddlers with barrowsful of tiny, shrunken mangoes. Each no bigger than a child's fist, their buttery skins are somewhat wrinkled and display telltale black marks and smudges. This produce travels far and rough to get here. It reminds me of the line of battered utes I saw hiding under the shadow of a busy overpass in Beijing. The rough-cheeked drivers were out making quick deals with city merchants, offloading the immense green globes of watermelons that filled the trays of their trucks. Never before has mere fruit selling seemed to me so illicit or so quick and dirty.

The last form of fresh stuff you see being touted on Chengdu's pavements are bunches of variagated 'tsai' - all manner of leafy veg, plucked straight from their beds and made into rough bundles for sale from barrows and baskets and cracked peasant hands. The fact that soil still clings to the roots of these dinner plants, even once they've made their way into the urban centre, feels poignant somehow. It seems emblematic in a way of the Janus faces of China: new and old, city and country, Carrefour mega-chains and peasant traders.