Obituary: Yu Zhijian died on March 30th

THE work was some of the trickiest Yu Zhijian and his friends had ever done. First they had to break each egg, 20 of them, neatly over a bowl. Then they had to fill each one with oil paint, dark blue, red or yellow, and glue it back together. Whose lousy scheme was this? he thought. Lousy except for the giant omelette, with spring onions, they were going to devour afterwards? Well, his. He had realised that eggs by themselves were too pale to leave much of a splash. So here he was sticky-fingered in Beijing, working like a snail, when inside he was jumping round like the Monkey King, able to fly 22,000km in one somersault, do magic with every hair of his body, and freeze demons. Ready to overturn China, in fact.

There were three of them, all from Liuyang in Hunan province: himself, his classmate Lu Decheng, a mechanic for the bus company, and Yu Dongyue, no relation, just a poetry-scribbling short-sighted friend, who wrote about art for the local paper. Yu Zhijian was not the eldest...