It was teeming with rain as I drove to work one morning in late 1965, and the young woman walking ahead of me was already soaked through.  I recognised her as a Russian teacher from the lycee where I taught English, so I pulled in and opened the door for her. After a moment’s hesitation she said ‘No, thank you’, in heavily accented French, and plodded onwards.

Most of the foreign ‘coopérants’ in Algeria in those days were French, working in schools and hospitals or helping to keep the infrastructure from crumbling away while Algerians were being trained to replace them. But a fair number came from communist countries, since the government of Houari Boumediene (a dead ringer for Samuel Beckett) was by far the most left-leaning of all the African countries.

The most visible were the Bulgarians, who seemed to have taken over the main hospital in Tlemcen, the town in western Algeria where we were living.  ‘La médecine bulgare, ça tue!’ (Bulgarian medicine kills you!) warned Zohra, our housekeeper, when she learned that Christou, six months pregnant, was off  for a checkup. And we did indeed wonder about the qualifications of the woman ‘doctor’ who looked Christou in the eyes and peremptorily announced ‘albumen négatif’.

Except at their place of work we never came across these eastern Europeans.  They kept to themselves, living, it appeared, in tightly policed enclaves, mixing neither with the Algerians nor with the likes of us, which explains why my Russian colleague was prepared to risk pneumonia rather than be seen in a car with a westerner.

What none of us realised was that Algeria also teemed with people from considerably farther east. That is, until a group of us drove 140 kilometres some time in 1967 to see a performance at the Oran Opera House.  It was just as well that we had bought our tickets early, as the place was absolutely packed out, mainly by hundreds and hundreds of Chinese, all waiting in excited anticipation for the curtain to go up.

When it did we were treated to a mind-boggling all-singing, all-dancing technicolor blast of Maoist propaganda, the Cultural Revolution wrapped up  in candy floss.  God it was thrilling!  None of us westerners even suspected that this kind of opera existed. What I didn’t know at the time was that this, presumably, was one of the ‘8 model Revolutionary Operas’, the brainchild of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing  There were no surtitles in those days, so I hadn’t much of a clue what it was about; but there was a lot of trudging and fighting going on, so I assumed it had something to do with Mao’s Great March and the birth of the communist state.

There are two things I remember most vividly: firstly, the great freeze frames (as in the photo at the top of this page), when much of the cast assumed heroic poses for ten seconds at a time, depicting events which - judging by the vociferous applause - were as familiar to the Chinese audience as the raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima would be to a bunch of elderly Americans.

But most of all I remember the fighting; agile and balletic, choreographed to the clash and flash of swords. Not only had I never seen anything like it before, but I would have to wait another 40 years or so to see its like, in the king fu and martial arts films from Hong Kong and, later, from mainland China.  I can’t remember any interval, and I’m not sure if the performance lasted two hours or three; but I wouldn’t have wished it to be a second shorter.

As we finally made our way out of the Opera House into the warmth of  a North African evening we saw a whole convoy of coaches engulfing their passengers, all of them Chinese.  They drove off into the darkness, and we never saw any of them again.