Q) MY Land Rover’s engine failed on the motorway and the firm will only pay £3,000 of the £21,000 repair cost.

When I bought the car in December 2022 for £36,000, I also bought an extended warranty that says I can claim up to the value of the car.

I have now been told the warranty will only pay £3,000 maximum per claim, and that my car is too old to warrant a gesture of goodwill. 

As the engine failure was no fault of my own, surely Land Rover should cover all the costs of fixing my car?

Anne Butcher, Norwich

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A) YOU were thrilled when you bought your 2017-plate Land Rover discovery for £36k in December 2022 with just 44,000 miles on it. 

You got the car through a Land Rover dealership and bought the best warranty available, which said it would cover up to the full value of your car.

But then in May this year, your vehicle’s engine suddenly failed on the M11 motorway, nearly causing a very serious accident.

There had been no warning signs on the dashboard in advance and you have no idea what caused it. 

But that was only the start of your problems.

When you reported the incident to Jaguar Land Rover and tried to claim on your warranty, the firm said it would pay £3,000 towards the repair costs.

But now you’ve have been quoted £21,000 for the repairs, meaning you need to top up the remaining £18,000.

You’ve checked your warranty small print over and over and can’t figure out why you aren’t covered in full. 

You don’t believe the engine failure was caused by anything you did. In fact, a number of drivers with the same Ingenium 2.0 engine have reported problems similar to yours.

You attempted to complain to the motor ombudsman, but it said wait times were over six months and you can’t wait that long without a vehicle.

Thankfully, when I spoke with Jaguar Land Rover, it immediately agreed to investigate your case and reopened it.

It has been a lengthy investigation, but I’m pleased to say the firm has now agreed to cover your whole repair cost and has now provided a courtesy car until yours is fixed. 

The firm has been in touch to confirm this and said it’s pleased to provide this resolution – and you’re thrilled. 

Our Squeeze Team has won back a total of £201,310 for readers.

How to contact our Squeeze Team

Our Squeeze Team wins back money for readers who have had a refund or billing issue with a company and are struggling to get it resolved.

We’ve won back thousands of pounds for readers including £22,000 for a man asked to pay back benefits to the DWP, £2,800 for a family who had a hellish holiday and £635 for a seller scammed on eBay.

To get help, write to our consumer champion, Laura Purkess.

I love getting your letters and emails, so do write to me at squeezeteam@thesun.co.uk or Laura Purkess, The Sun, 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF.

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Tell me what happened and don’t forget to provide your phone number so I can ring you if I need more information. Share with me any reference number the company has given you relating to your case, or any account name/number if you’re a customer.

Include the following line so I can go to the firm on your behalf: “I give permission for [company’s name] to discuss my case with Laura Purkess at The Sun”.

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Chinese artificial intelligence companies are driving down costs to create competitive models, as they contend with US chip restrictions and smaller budgets than their Western counterparts.

Start-ups such as 01.ai and DeepSeek have reduced prices by adopting strategies such as focusing on smaller data sets to train AI models and hiring cheap but skilled computer engineers.

Bigger technology groups such as Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance have also engaged in a pricing war to cut “inference” costs, the price of calling upon large language models to generate a response, by more than 90 per cent and to a fraction of that offered by US counterparts.

This is despite Chinese companies having to navigate Washington’s ban on exports of the highest-end Nvidia AI chips, seen as crucial to developing the most cutting edge models in the US.

Beijing-based 01.ai, led by Lee Kai-Fu, the former head of Google China, said it has cut inference costs by building a model trained on smaller amounts of data that requires less computing power and optimising their hardware.

“China’s strength is to make really affordable inference engines and then to let applications proliferate,” Lee told the Financial Times.

This week, 01.ai’s Yi-Lightning model came joint third among LLM companies alongside x.AI’s Grok-2, but behind OpenAI and Google in a ranking released by researchers at UC Berkeley SkyLab and LMSYS.

The evaluations are based on users that score different models’ answers to queries. Other Chinese players, including ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek have also crept up the ranking boards of LLMs.

The cost for inference at 01.ai’s Yi-Lightning is 14 cents per million tokens, compared with 26 cents for OpenAI’s smaller model GPT o1-mini. Meanwhile inference costs for OpenAI’s much larger GPT 4o is $4.40 per million tokens. The number of tokens used to generate a response depends on the complexity of the query.

Lee also said Yi-Lightning cost $3mn to “pre-train”, initial model training that can then be fine-tuned or customised for different use cases. This is a small fraction of the cost cited by the likes of OpenAI for its large models. He added the aim is not to have the “best model”, but a competitive one that is “five to 10 times less expensive” for developers to use to build applications. 

Many Chinese AI groups, including 01.ai, DeepSeek, MiniMax and Stepfun have adopted a so-called “model-of-expert” approach, a strategy first popularised by US researchers. 

Rather than training one “dense model” at once on a vast database that has scraped data from the internet and other sources, the approach combines many neural networks trained on industry-specific data.

Researchers view the model-of-expert approach as a key way to achieve the same level of intelligence as a dense model but with less computing power. But the approach can be more prone to failure as engineers have to orchestrate the training process across multiple “experts” rather than in one model. 

Given the difficulty in securing a steady and ample supply of high-end AI chips, Chinese AI players have been competing over the past year to develop the highest-quality data sets to train these “experts” to set themselves apart from the competition.

Lee said 01.ai has approaches to data collection beyond the traditional method of scraping the internet, including scanning books and crawling articles on the messaging app WeChat that are inaccessible on the open web.

“There is a lot of thankless gruntwork” for engineers to label and rank data, he said, but added China — with its vast pool of cheap engineering talent — is better placed to do that than the US. 

“China’s strength is not doing the best breakthrough research that no one has done before where the budget has no limit,” said Lee. “China’s strength is to build well, build fast, build reliably and build cheap.”

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in San Francisco

A MAN says his neighbours hate the haunted house full of “dead bodies” in his front garden – but he doesn’t care.

Rob Amey began the beloved Halloween attraction in 2017, with just a few fake cemetery headstones at his Sittingbourne house, in Kent.

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The dad-of-three started out with a simple set-up to raise some cash for an Autism charity and managed to collect nearly £500.

To boost funds, the 51-year-old decided to hand-craft an intricate haunted house the following year.

In total the family has raised some £5,500 for The Autism Apprentice CIC so far.

Rob has enlisted the help of his alarm and electronics business – Amey Security Systems – for the mammoth build each September.

His trade skills have allowed him to install the house of horrors full with electrics and pressure pad systems to set off various spooky props.

“Every other year we’ve run it we ran it from 5pm until 9pm, Friday, Saturday and Sundays,” Rob told The Sun.

“This year it’s 6pm until 9pm.

“We raised £490 the first time, that was just with some cemetery railings. But the first time we did a big build like this we raised over £2,500.

“I pay to store all this stuff in three garages, I’m renting them all year long, each garage is around £80 a month and then there’s a month off work to build it all.

“This is really the last year we can do it, but we’re going out with a bang.

“I could say what I pay in rent and come to the same amount as we donate.

“I get frustrated, stressed and anxious that it won’t be done in time but I enjoy it.

“You have to reinvent it every year, through imagination, there’s so many films to draw from.

“I thought of this one as I was walking half way through last year’s opening night. I always start scavenging stuff from November.

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“This is made of plywood that you paint and construct, it’s basic carpentry skills as long as you can measure and cut straight it’s not that difficult.

“Props wise a lot are imported from America. You have to pay through the nose for import duties though but they do it better.”

Brave visitors who dare to enter are not required to pay any fee, but simply donate what they can.

“It’s just nice to raise money for good causes,” added Rob.

His devoted wife Laura is a health visitor and has chosen several volunteer groups that support people with Autism to help this year.

“Whatever we raise will be split between them,” said the proud husband.

Their 13-year-old son George enjoys taking part in the theatrics of the haunted house and has his routine planned out for this year.

The drama-loving teen will feature as a live actor in the ‘Insane Asylum’.

It is expected to draw in hundreds of locals, as well as keen visitors who all the way from London for the experience.

“We can have a queue that goes down onto the green, everyone is pretty respectful,” said Rob.

“Probably around two per cent of people who come are idiots, usually teenage lads.

“If they’ve been scared they’re embarrassed and might get a bit funny.

“There was one person who walked back into the house through the exit and punched part of the set because he got angry about being jump-scared.”

Meanwhile, “one of the best scares” came when a heavily tattooed man came on his own and let out “the highest pitch scream you’ve ever heard”, recalled Rob.

“And I literally saw him slide down the wall because he’d jumped so high he was so scared,” the dad-of-three added.

“Another woman said she had wet herself a bit.

“One lady came in, gave us the best scream of the night. I was dressed as Freddy Krueger, she came outside and I followed.

“She tried to retreat away but I chased her down the street and her family were all doubled over laughing.”

‘TERRIFIC CAUSE’

Locals living in the street hailed the haunted house and Rob’s work each year.

Neighbour Clare said: “I think it’s brilliant, I send everyone there. I go through with my grandchildren.

“I’ve got friends coming over next Sunday and we will have a few drinks and go round there.

“We usually have a Halloween party and go round there afterwards. It scares me.

“He starts it it August, he works so hard, we get loads of people around but it doesn’t bother me. It all goes to charity.”

Fellow neighbour John agreed: “I think he should be congratulated on it, a lot of hard work goes into that.

My neighbour is the UK’s ‘WORST’ – his front garden is a ‘Frankenstein art installation’ & he sounds air horn all night

By Ryan Merrifield

A FURIOUS son says his late mum’s ‘artivist’ neighbour is a nightmare after leaving a mound of ‘rubbish’ to build up in his garden for years.

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John Kirby has been forced to take mum Doreen Moore’s house off the market after struggling to sell it due to the “eyesore” pile.

Doreen – who had Alzheimer’s – had been living in a care home since last year, before her death on October 2.

And John, 62, has been trying to sell her two bedroom home in Dalgety Bay, Fife, in Scotland, in an effort to keep up with her care bills and now cover the small debts that have built up.

He said 86-year-old Doreen, even up to her dying day and despite the memory loss caused by her condition, was asking if the house had sold and if the rubbish had gone.

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However, neighbour Denis Carbonaro said the pile-up is actually part of his latest ‘artivist’ campaign which he calls the ‘Dalgety Baycott’.

John says he and his neighbours have complained to Fife Council, as well as Police Scotland, but he claims they’ve been told Carbonaro is not breaching any rules.

However, he believes the artist was warned off by the authorities from sounding an air raid style horn attached to a tree.

John told The Sun: “I don’t know what I can do. I’ve tried going down all the routes I can.”

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He now fears all the old wood used to build the sculptures could prove to be a fire hazard.

John said people have been discussing the issue on local Facebook groups, but: “It’s almost like he’s thriving on the publicity.

“Every day the garden just gets worse and worse and worse. I mean, there’s a fridge freezer in the front garden now, and I’ve now heard there’s a banner hanging from his front windows.

“I don’t know what he’s trying to do. I’ve had to take the house off the market because nobody’s going to buy it with that eyesore.”

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He said another neighbour was told by an estate agent “there’s absolutely no point you putting your house on the market”.

“They suggested to her to go down the legal route with solicitors,” he added.

“It might be a bit frustrating when people come but I’m prepared to let that happen for a week and fair play to him. It’s for a terrific cause.”

Although he did admit: “The Saturdays it’s very difficult to get in and out of the close, but if you know it’s going to happen you plan for it.”

Meanwhile, Louise next-door said: “We love it, we help out when we can. You get people lining up all long the road.

“It’s for a good cause and we enjoy it.”

But, she also highlighted a few issues with the amount of foot traffic the event attracts.

“It can be a bit annoying because people don’t realise and walk across your garden, or try to park on the grass,” she said.

“But he’s putting out cones to stop that from happening now so that’s good.”

Another local, Barbara, denied there were any parking issues at all.

“We think it’s great, their children have Autism and it raises money for a good cause,” she praised.

“We have plenty of room, there’s a turning point, places to park, there’s never been a problem.”

‘SHOCKED NO ONE HAS BEEN RUN DOWN’

Despite the overall love for Rob and Laura’s spooktacular creation, there were two neighbours who weren’t fans.

The locals, who wished to remain anonymous, expressed their concerns with parking and noise.

One said: “I agree with it in principle and have nothing against the money they are raising but there are so many people and there’s no parking.

“I couldn’t get out one year and if there was an emergency no one would be able to get in.

“My child is also really scared of it every year so she won’t go outside, and it can be pretty noisy.”

Another resident on the street, who is known by everyone for complaining about the haunted house, added: “I don’t like it.

“There’s no where for anyone to park. One year I went out and I couldn’t get back in.

“And it’s dark, there’s little kids running about everywhere, I’m shocked no one has been run down yet.”

Rob and Laura have been fully backed by Swale Borough Council despite the neighbour complaints.

The haunted house is classed as a temporary structure which avoids any complications.

Council officials also advised the couple to shut down the event by a certain time of night – which they always abide by.

Swale Borough Council was contacted for comment.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘The Dinner Table’, a collection of food writing

Hold the phone, TV commissioners: I have a truly irresistible drama for you. An autumn village, middle England. Dappled light. Fallen leaves. Conkers — and the people in the world who care most about conkers. For this is the World Conker Championships. 

Among them, King Conker himself. Top judge, men’s finalist, he is clad in a gold-lined forest-green cape-coat heavily adorned with wizened conkers of years gone by. He sports, also, a kind of mayoral chain of more conkers. 

King Conker — known, in civilian life, as David — is 82 years old. He is the man who prepares the conkers before the event; he selects them for competition, drills the holes, affixes the strings. But he, himself, has never won. This may be his last chance.

At stake is the tea towel of victory, plus a commemorative WCC coaster. Plus, of course, glory. But how far would King Conker go to get it? And is that a . . . home-wrought steel conker, painted impeccably trompe-l’oeil style and threaded on an identical shoelace to the competition shoelaces in his pocket? And would he . . . use it? 

Listen: this story has everything. Not just the steel conker, or the conker costumes. There’s the young upstart: a woman but also . . . American! There’s centuries of obscure, folklore-inflected tradition. There’s the age-old tale of one last job. And riding on all this? A man’s honour — or another man’s hard-earned victory tea towel. It’s Midsomer Murders without a single murder.  

“I was found with the steel conker in my pocket,” King Conker explained, afterwards. “But I only carry [it] around with me for humour value.”

This is, needless to say, not the view of King Conker’s defeated opponent. “My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen,” he told The Telegraph. “I’m suspicious.”

The WCC are anxious to point out the many safeguards in place including a pre-selected sack, watched over by officers. “Members of the committee have . . . concluded that, as far as we can tell, play was fair, and the rules were followed,” St John Burkett, WCC spokesperson, told MailOnline. The young American woman, Kelci Banschbach, was the competition’s overall winner. But that’s not the point.

The point — and why this story is so compelling — is that it makes the invisible visible. Everywhere you look, there are universes overlapping with yours of which you know nothing at all. People have their small private domains — villages, societies, group chats — and those domains have lore. There are novels in these worlds! There are dramas and comedies and tragedies with surprising consequences. For almost everyone, conkers is a children’s game; for King Conker, the stakes could not be higher: not just a tea towel, after all, but a whole community. Did he, after a lifetime of service, betray his friends? 

I still think with fondness of a notice I once saw on a bowling green pinboard, heavily amended in biro: “Do NOT call Ron about membership! Ron is NO LONGER responsible for assigning memberships and his recommendations will NOT be followed. Thank you.” Ron’s number had been assiduously removed. Poor Ron. Or perhaps, naughty Ron. Who can say? Not me, which was why I loved it so much. It was an unsolvable little mystery; a small and needful reminder that, whatever is going on with you, other things are also always going on. 

There are whole worlds of intrigue and pain and glory all around us. There is suffering and bad behaviour and commemorative tea towels! People are small and lovely and bad; and just like you, and unlike you; and your private trials and triumphs are but one in eight billion.

You are, I suppose, not alone in the universe. Which is a pretty substantial return, moral-wise, from a single steel conker on a sunny Sunday, no? Commissioners: you heard it here first. 

THE Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) hands out a tax-free bonus to hard-pressed households ahead of Christmas.

If you meet the criteria, the money is usually paid into your bank account automatically, meaning you do not have to apply.

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If you are not sure if you have received the payment before, check on your bank statements for a code which says “DWP XB”.

To get the money you usually need to be claiming benefits before the qualifying week, which is usually the first week of December.

The full list of benefits which make you eligible for the bonus include:

• Adult Disability Payment
• Armed Forces Independence Payment
• Attendance Allowance
• Carer’s Allowance
• Carer Support Payment
• Child Disability Payment
• Constant Attendance Allowance (paid under Industrial Injuries or War Pensions schemes)
• Contribution-based Employment and Support Allowance (once the main phase of the benefit is entered after the first 13 weeks of claim)
• Disability Living Allowance
• Incapacity Benefits at the long-term rate
• Industrial Death Benefit (for widows or widowers)
• Mobility Supplement
• Pension Credit – the guarantee element
• Personal Independence Payment (PIP)
• State Pension (including Graduated Retirement Benefit)
• Severe Disablement Allowance (transitionally protected)
• Unemployability Supplement or Allowance (paid under Industrial Injuries or War Pensions schemes)
• War Disablement Pension at State Pension Age
• War Widow’s Pension
• Widowed Mother’s Allowance
• Widowed Parent’s Allowance
• Widow’s Pension

If you meet the criteria, you will get £10 from the DWP to help towards costs over Christmas.

It is not exactly clear when the money will appear, but the DWP does say that if you think you should get it and the money hasn’t come through by January 1, you must contact your local Jobcentre Plus office.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that in some cases you could be entitled to claim even if you are not claiming benefits.

This usually only applies if you are in a partnership, for example a marriage or civil partnership, and are claiming the State Pension.

State Pension loophole

For example, your partner may still get the £10 bonus if you are both over the State Pension age by the end of the qualifying week.

This usually starts on the first Monday of December, so this year it will begin on the 2nd of the month.

In this instance, one of you will need to be claiming a qualifying benefit, such as Pension Credit.

Both of you will also need to be aged either 66 or above by the start of December.

So, for example, a retired husband may be claiming Pension Credit and his wife is not, but his claim makes them both eligible for the bonus.

However, you will not get the money paid out separately – instead a total of £20 will be paid in one account.

And bear in mind that your partner who is claiming must also be entitled to an increase in their qualifying benefit.

So, for example, you can be entitled to an increase in Pension Credit if you start living with your partner.

The benefit tops up your weekly income to £213 if you’re single or your joint weekly income to £332.95 if you have a partner.

If an increase in benefit is paid for an adult partner that should be shown on the benefit award letters sent out annually, or when the benefit was first claimed.

It will usually say something like “extra amount paid for your partner” and give a figure.

If the benefit is pension credit the award letter will say something like “amount for you and your partner”.

Other factors

To get the cash, you also must be present or a resident in the UK, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibraltar or Switzerland during the qualifying week.

If you are concerned about your partner missing out, contact with the DWP for help.

Samuel Thomas, senior policy advisor at anti-poverty charity Z2K, told The Sun: “Many people are entitled to more financial support from the social security system than they realise.

“If you’re struggling financially, you should check whether you can claim any additional benefits or seek independent advice.”

If you are worried about costs this winter, make sure you’re aware of different support available to you.

For example, councils are giving out up to £500 in cash and food grants via the Household Support Fund.

How to check your eligibility?

For those who are unsure if they can get access to the bonus and other help, you can use an online benefits calculator.

These are free-to-use online tools which can be accessed at a number of websites.

For example, the charity Turn2Us’ has a benefits calculator that works out what you could get.

Entitledto also has a free calculator that determines whether you qualify for various benefits, including tax credits and Universal Credit.

You can also use Policy in Practice’s calculator to determine which benefits you could receive and how much cash you’ll have left over each month after paying for housing costs.

Your exact entitlement will only be clear when you make a claim, but calculators can indicate what you might be eligible for.

If you do not want to use an online calculator there are other options available.

For example, you can also check with a local benefits adviser to find out what you could be entitled to.

The website advicelocal.uk lets you enter your postcode and informs you of your nearest adviser and how you can contact them.

For example, if you enter on the website that you live in Wandsworth, London it will give you the details of the nearest support in the area.

In this instance, it was the borough’s local Age UK and Citizens Advice.

You should be aware that many organisations do not offer an open-door service.

If you are planning to contact an organisation for help or advice you might want to check their website for more information before doing so.

Although it is on the edge of Nanjing, the backstage area of the Poly Grand Theatre has more than a touch of New England about it. In one dressing room, prison clothes and a faintly familiar flat cap hang from the wall. They will be worn by Mark Rowswell, a 59-year-old Canadian who, until he starts speaking Mandarin, looks as though he would only ever be reading from an English script.

Over four decades, Rowswell has carved out a career in the Chinese language. Breaking through on state-backed television in the late 1980s and 1990s, he was the first foreigner to be initiated into “crosstalk”, a specialised form of stand-up comedy. This year, after a three-year hiatus, he is touring the country in a Chinese-language production of The Shawshank Redemption. Every part is played by a foreigner.

Trying to learn Chinese is a bit like trying to learn tennis in a world with a billion Roger Federers. But Rowswell, even if he didn’t pick up a racket until he was 19, has the aura of a Wimbledon contender. Among the Chinese population, where he is known as Dashan, he easily ranks among the most famous living foreigners. If you impress a taxi driver, you might be flattered with a comparison. “The funny thing is, people actually do say that to me,” he tells me, a few hours before the play begins. “You speak good Chinese, but not as good as Dashan.”

His almost mythological status, like many myths, is tied up in the soul of a nation. As China reopened from Communist closure in the 1980s (“The next century belongs to China,” he recalls in the headlines of the time), few outsiders had learnt the basics of the language. Rowswell, who arrived in 1988 to study, was soon swept up in an often joyful process of rediscovering the wider world.

Today, the mood has shifted. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when Rowswell remained in Canada, China was once again cut off. Its relationship with the world’s superpower deteriorated sharply. North Americans are again few and far between: there are now fewer than 1,000 US university students in China, compared with more than 10,000 pre-pandemic. In this environment, the prospect of greater integration, linguistically or culturally, suddenly seems distant.

Meanwhile, political controls have tightened. The Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 prison drama based on a Stephen King novella that became one of the most celebrated American films, is a bold performance to stage. For some, it might be seen to embody a competing worldview. But Rowswell, despite finding himself in a different era, still believes in the pursuit of “commonality”.

“In English, we would say this is a story about freedom. In China, we would see it more as a story about hope,” he says. “But what is it that we hope for? Freedom.”

It was in 1988, shortly after graduating in Chinese from the University of Toronto, that Rowswell first played the part of Dashan. The name, which literally means “Big Mountain”, was given to him for a skit on state-run China Central Television in which two foreigners were speaking “vernacular street Chinese”.

He had a foreign accent, he says, but after another year of study he appeared with Chinese comedians. “Everyone remembered that image [from a year earlier],” he says. “That’s when I started to get the reputation for someone who speaks Chinese better than Chinese people.”

It is hard to imagine anyone elsewhere attaining such a reputation so quickly, or at all. But modern Mandarin Chinese, like the railways, the mass media, the schools and the newly reopened stock market, was part of a 20th-century nation-building exercise: an updated lingua franca. Many people in China were, and still are, native speakers of dialects that remain distinct from it.

I think there’s a very, very deep sense in China that they are misunderstood at a very fundamental level, and they never will be understood

The spectacle of a Canadian conveying the country’s officially defined sounds struck a chord. “This whole idea [of speaking] Chinese better than the Chinese was culturally reassuring,” says Rowswell. “I think there was a real angst about losing Chinese culture and language.”

He recalls the routine for crosstalk: “I would be the foreign pupil and I would be working with my Chinese teacher, but I would always be getting the better of my teacher . . . and that became kind of a comedic schtick.” 

This public image soon became “oppressive”. People were eager to test him. “It had become this sort of perfect, ‘Dashan opens his mouth and poetry comes out’ kind of thing, and I can’t do that in real life,” he says. “I can’t live up to the standard of a polished television show 24/7.”

The most striking thing about Rowswell is his voice, an instrument that remains finely tuned no matter how long he plays it. So, while out of China for three years during the pandemic, he set up a voice recording studio in Canada. 

His first project was a Chinese translation of the memoir of a Canadian doctor in Henan province in the 1930s (the Brits and Americans would be in Beijing or Shanghai, but “smaller countries like Canada” would be in the hinterlands). It was a “salute” to his own grandparents, Canadians who lived in China in the 1920s as Anglican missionaries. There was widespread tuberculosis at the time. “They came with three children and left with one,” he says.

After that, he soon moved on to classical Chinese poetry, which he recites to music. It might have been expected that he had already studied it, before or during his rise, as many western university students of Chinese do. “It’s too complicated, it’s too advanced,” he says. He has a database of several hundred poems by now.

His recitations, which he memorises (he struggles to read from a script, and suspects he has a “little bit of dyslexia”), have tens of millions of views on social media platforms. Many of the comments remark that he is now “old”, which, not wanting to be “frozen in time”, he doesn’t mind. Others remark, as they did decades ago, on the quality of his Chinese. He says the poems are recognised as being performed to a “professional level”, rather than being a “novelty”.

“As a performer, in a piece that I’ve worked on, I can achieve native-level fluency,” he says. “But not in regular life.”

What does he lack? He often makes “a mental note of an interesting expression” when listening to others speak, “because I would think, I could express that idea, but I wouldn’t express it the same way, and that’s a much [more] elegant way.

“I’ll search for words, and maybe I’ll use repetitive patterns of expression that are more limited than a native speaker.”

Speaking is one challenge, but understanding is another matter. In a culture that venerates age, people try to test him less often now. But he has also embraced imperfection. “I try in my work now to be sincere,” he says, “and when I don’t understand something, just to tell people I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you think too,” he adds, “part of the thing about having an international experience is you learn how to operate in an environment where you don’t necessarily understand everything?”

For Rowswell, the experience has been international by design. In the mid-1990s, he moved back to Canada with his Chinese wife and two children. Even during the golden era of integration, he travelled to the mainland for around half the year, rather than living there.

Is China more closed now? “Certainly.” But he “never expected China was going to become a western democracy or anything”. As with his own career, he sees the internet as the driver of change. “It seems to have made it more important for us to find an identity, because it’s kind of scary [for] the world to be so open.”

In contrast to Canada, he says, China has “such a strong sense of self-identity” and emphasises difference when comparing cultures. “I think there’s a very, very deep sense in China that they are misunderstood at a very fundamental level, and they never will be understood,” he adds. But sometimes, he is told that “foreigners just don’t get it, except for Dashan”.

His own internationalism, meanwhile, seems embedded in his upbringing in postwar Canada. He says he “totally failed” with compulsory French at school, though an hour earlier, when describing his grandfather’s service in the first world war, he pronounced Ypres with a certain aplomb. Canada was, in his childhood, an “immigrant society”, one where you’re exposed to “all different kinds of cultures”.

“I had friends who were from India, or Hungary, or Lithuania, and they spoke their native language at home with their parents and then they came to school and they spoke English,” he says. “So that’s why I started studying Chinese in the beginning . . . I started to just really think, man, I should learn a different language too.”

A few hours later, at least among the audience in the Nanjing Poly Grand Theatre, the sense of New England is less palpable. The foreign actors deliver their lines in impressively standard Mandarin, and the story, complete with Bible references, remains intact.

Zhang Guoli, the director and only Chinese person to speak, is introduced on to the stage by Rowswell. He thanks the cast, in a Mandarin that is somehow the same, and somehow different. “They love China,” he says. One young actor spontaneously raises his hands in acknowledgment.

Is this, I wonder, a glimpse of China dressed up in a foreign costume? For Rowswell, who is not well known outside the country, it was another performance among many: part of a long, unusual career, with which almost everyone in the theatre would have been so familiar that it does not, really, seem unusual at all.

“That’s one of the problems I have with doing foreign media interviews,” he says. “The readers at least, or the audience, don’t have that background, so it’s always a new story, it’s always a novelty story.”

Dashan, Rowswell reflects, has always been a “specific entity” — a character who exists within a Chinese universe.

“It only exists within that universe,” he adds. “Even this article, this is sort of outside of the universe.”

Thomas Hale is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent.

Additional reporting by Wang Xueqiao

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