With his bare hands, my great-grandfather laid every grey brick of our home. But he was little more than a whisper to me, a ghost buried within the walls of the house, having died when my own father was five years old.

Before my great-grandparents moved to Xi’an to establish this four-generation dynasty, they scratched a living from the countryside’s fallow soil.

Since ancient times, the land of Xi’an has sat between two mighty rivers, which flow down from the great Tibet plateaux, where the ethereal frozen lakes meet the glaciers at the foot of Everest. To the north of Xian is the Yellow River, moving like a serpent across the yellow plateau and the plains of centre and north. In its basin, our civilisation was born. To the south is the Yangtze: later its valley was the great hub of population, wealth and culture.

Xi’an rests on a levelled expanse of land at the heart of the Yellow River basin. On all sides it is bounded by mountains, a natural barrier against invasion. Two thousand years ago, on this land, the mighty Qin Shi Huang’s soldiers subdued the other Warring States. China was united at last, and Quin Shi Huang ruled everything under the heavens.

The earth surrounding Xi’an is as hard and formidable as the kings it has made. The yellow sands blow in from the deserts of Inner Asia, blasting every surface. Dust coats everything: roads, carts, roofs, plants, people. The summers incinerate every green shoot, and in the frozen winters winds slash...

The people are as gritty as the land — grit wedged between their toes, stuck in their teeth and the creases of their flesh. In their hearts, too.

Beneath the drama of great dynasties is the parched rattle and grinding of teeth and bones. In this rugged, desolate environment, survival is always at the forefront of everybody’s mind.

But the centre of Chinese civilisation moved away to the east, towards the coast. Xian, the once-great capital of eleven kingdoms, began a long decline, slipping into obscurity — a backwater. In the face of time’s immensity, the infinite theatre of the millennia, even great dynasties like the Han and the Tang, the most glorious beneficiaries of China’s cosmology, can appear flimsy.

Only the sand and wind endure.

*

My great-grandfather came to the city in 1912, the year after the Xinhai revolution had brought down the Qing dynasty, terminating two millennia of imperial rule that stretched back to Qin Shi Huang. A republic was declared on the first day of 1912. China was too fragmented for a strong centralised state to emerge. The shadow of war hung over the entire land. No city, village, or family was untouched

Great grandfather left the countryside when the yellow earth had no more to yield. A century of war, conscription, famine and opium had scorched the terrain. Twenty-six years old, travelling on foot, he hauled a handcart on which perched his nineteen year old bride, an infant on her back, an older child beside her, gripping the edges of the cart with tiny fingers. It was the longest journey of their lives. Behind them lay the hovels of Black Ox village. Ahead, the ancient walls of the city of Xi’an.

They settled in a mud hut outside the city wall. My great-grandpa found work building houses, dragging bricks by handcart from the village twenty miles away — gruelling work that would have broken a lesser man’s spirit. His wife - my great-grandmother, ‘Taitai’ - sold bread in the market and spun yarn, pocketing the few coins she received. She was trying to conjure a life out of nothing, just as my great-grandfather made bricks from the cracked country soil.

In the frozen darkness before dawn, Taitai struck the iron and flint to light her stove, filling it with straw to bake bread. My great-grandfather set off with his cart, hands numb, the skin weeping with sores.

A land of peasants, of hard and bitter labour, of the daily resolve to keep going, somehow. But not for everyone. As the first fingers of dawn reached into my grandparents’ hut, in Shanghai, a thousand miles to the east, it was already light, though even before the darkness lifted, electric lamps illuminated the elegantly paved streets along the bank of the Huangpu River in the International Settlement. As the last remnants of nightlife ebbed into the dawn and cabaret fanatics prepared to sleep off their jazz hangovers, well-heeled breakfasters were sitting down to Russian borscht, French bread, Austrian pastries and Japanese sashimi. Pots of imported coffee wafted aromas of caramel and citrus, while gust of tobacco smoke drifted from the foreign mouth that exhaled it. All along Nanjing Road there was the dazzle of neon signage, flashing boasts of exotic goods from abroad: hot chocolate, perfume, lipsticks. These foreigners weren’t in China to pay ‘tribute'. Their countrymen had arrived with guns and cannons half a century earlier, intent on dominance.

The glamour of Shanghai was a fragrant and seductive garden, but one from which most Chinese people were excluded. Outside the elegant Western restaurants hung signs with a curt warning: ‘No dogs or Chinese allowed.’ For the ordinary Chinese, a banker was a money devil. The ‘compradors’ - the Chinese who worked for foreign traders - were thought of as little better than slaves. This young republic was a queasy cocktail of stock exchange prosperity, Hollywood glitz, famine, bullets and gangsters.

*

Xi’an’s South Gate Plaza was a miniature version of Nanjing Road. Each day, Tai-tai wound the long black cotton bandage around her deformed feet, as she tottered beneath the weight of two buckets of water on a pole. And she was there in the plaza, arranging her bread for sale and minding her children, when paper rained down from the sky, fliers bearing political messages — ‘Wake up, China!’ “Abolish subservience, hierarchy, patriarchy and decadence”. Tai-tai didn’t grab one. She kept her gaze fixed on her bread. In any case, she couldn’t read.

At the same moment, hundreds of miles away in Beijing, there marched a young revolutionary born in the same year as her - 1893 - a farmer’s son called Mao Zedong. Born of a peasant family but now educated and working as a librarian, he was one of the many young men and women searching restlessly for China’s future direction.

For fifteen years, my great-grandparents laboured and grappled with the turbulence of crossing from one world to another — from the Qing dynasty to the upheavals of the new republic. Little by little they acquired the means to build a house of their own and chose as its site a narrow street called ‘Sweet Water Well’, close to South Gate Plaza. By the time my grandpa was born under that roof, in 1927, the Communist party, was already at war with the incumbent national party. Neither of the two little ones who had journeyed to the city in the hand cart survived to see these days of wonder.

*

Taitai’s room was the biggest in the house, it’s our living room, and we would also gather there for meals. Next to the table. A clay bed stretched the length of one side. In the winter this kang was heated by a stove lit beneath it; she would sit atop the platform in the daytime at night, quilts were unrolled over the heated clay surface, her bones were kept warm as she slept.

The raven black of her cheongsam was the only thing I remember her wearing. Her fine silver hair — or what was left of it — was always scraped back, and sometimes on the top of her head she wore a piece of cloth, a blue-and-white handkerchief in a style unique to the countryside of northern China. Her own teeth had long since been lost, and a new set chattered inside her mouth as she spoke, as if intent on an entirely different conversation.

She came into the world in 1893 — in a different century and under a different dynasty. Women of her generation had few prospects. While the Empress Dowager Cixi ruled via her young nephew Guangxu from the tranquillity of the Summer Palace in Beijing, the reality for girls born to ordinary families was quite different. Like her husband, my great-grandmother was a peasant, from a village next to the black Ox. She was born without a name. For the first part of her life she was known only as ‘second daughter’; when she married my great- grandfather, she became known as ‘wife of Zhang’. But to me, she was Tai-tai.

In the Qing dynasty. For many families, Foot binding was the one chance to increase their daughters worth to potential suitors. fragility was deemed attractive. They walk in a fashionable totter, that mark them out from the peasant girls. binding their feet was the main way of preserving them from a lifetime of servitude or field labour.

Taitai’s tiny feet were not much bigger than my own when I started to toddle. She walked as if on tiptoes, like a ballerina, her feet pointing at ten to two, at 86, a wooden walking stick helping her not to lose balance on the brick floor of our home.

Tai-tai moved swiftly, shooing away any offers of help as she made her way around the house. Each day she followed the same pattern, from kang to kitchen and back again, keeping the stove burning and the congee on top of it constantly simmering.

As she moved around constantly, her stick barely made a sound on the floor. It was an extension of her body, the handle polished smooth by her firm grip and the tip weathered like the extra tiny foot it had become.

After dinner my grandfather would tell stories about Tai-tai. stories of our family from the old days, the ashes and humble beginnings of village life that Taitai had risen from

She would sit silently on her kang, winding threads between crooked fingers, while he travelled back in time.

Like many poor families, Taitai’s parent invested everything in their eldest, binding the feet of her eldest sister, hoping she would make an advantageous match. Taitai envied her sister’s chance to climb the social ladder, then so steep. She wanted the same chances for herself — better to be deformed, in Qing-dynasty China, than a lowly able-bodied female.

I don’t now recollect all the details of how she broke the arches in her own feet. How, as a six-year-old girl, she bent them until they were doubled over on themselves and her toes almost touched her heels. My grandfather knew enough that the pain was almost unbearable. Tai-tai’s face remained impassive as he told us how she fashioned a sling to haul her feet skyward as she slept — the only way to take the edge off the pain.

All that self-mutilation achieved nothing, for she was unable to escape a life of toiling.

Grief was an iron weight pinned to her chest, but she bore it — a son lived to seventeen taken by pneumonia, along with other 4 children, their young lives evaporated in meagre air of the first half of the 20s century, no matter how hard she hold on to them..

While Grandpa talked, Tai-tai would say nothing. She just kept weaving, tugging occasionally on the thread. Sometimes she moved about on her knees, swept her Kang using a small broom made of sorghum stalk, gives out long dry rustles.

Looking at her, and reminded of her modest beginnings, I felt how far she had travelled to arrive at the esteem she now enjoyed within these walls. My grandfather spoke proudly of the agony she had withstood; there were a direct equation between how much one suffered and one’s right to be admired.

Occasionally Tai-tai would catch me staring at her hands as she worked, the bones crooked and protruding at awkward angles, the joints stiff and her skin as rough as bark. As a child, those hands reminded me of the oldest tree, gnarled and knotted by time, ridged and rutted with experience.

‘These hands have raised a family,’ she would tell me in her rustic Shaanxi dialect, which bore only a passing resemblance to Mandarin. ‘Every day was a matter of making it through to the next sunrise.’

My great-aunt, one of Tai-tai’s two surviving children, came to visit once a year from another city and would always make time to wash her mother’s feet. Through the doorway I watched in wonder as she gently unwound their cotton bandages. The smell was like old leather at first, then carrion. But I retreated out of an unspoken respect, knowing that she wouldn’t want me to see what lay beneath. Curiosity would gnaw inside my belly, yet somehow I understood that this was a private ceremony between the two of them. Not once did I see my great-grandmother’s feet uncovered by socks and shoes.

That house, our house, Though encompassed the four generations of Zhangs in Xi’an, above all it stood for the matriarch, the living legacy of her generation, the backbone of our family. Its story was her story, for she had spent her entire adult life there and grew old as it did. Her spirit had seeped into the bricks. The dirt on the floor had been compacted over the decades, and every millimetre represented years of her hobbling back and forth.

Like the ancient city, she had been rubbed raw by time and the elements, but remained a warrior, indomitable, an implacable will to survive – not just for herself, but for the family that was her universe.

Tai-tai endured among us, a living fossil.