The only Test cricketer of Chinese origin, Ellis Edgar “Puss” Achong, made enough of an impact bowling left-arm wrist spin in six Test matches for West Indies against England from 1930-35 that they named a ball — “the chinaman” — after him. What might happen if a country of 1.4 billion were to adopt the sport as enthusiastically as they have others such as table tennis?

Thus far, many of the clichéd reports of cricket gripping the Chinese have been just that — the truth has been much more fragile. But as they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and there has been genuine movement in the past two years.

The Asian Cricket Council (ACC) has a highly detailed ten-year development plan — The Strategy to Develop Cricket in China 2005-2015 — which reveals that Cricket Australia, the governing body in that country, provided US $650,000 (about £330,000) of coaching services in China from 2005-06.

Rumesh Ratnayake, the former Sri Lanka fast bowler, has been hired as head coach and last year an extra $400,000 in funding was announced by Malcolm Speed, the ICC chief executive. “As with any investment, timing is critical,” Syed Ashraful Huq, the ACC chief executive, said. “China has gone from practically no cricket activity one year ago to 51 schools in Beijing and Shanghai playing the game, with close to 6,500 participants.”

Speed remains cautiously optimistic. “There’s been a very good start in China,” he said. “This is a ten-year project and no one should be under any illusion that results will appear overnight.” Crucially, it seems the drive to embrace cricket is coming equally from the Chinese Government.

There is a record of a cricket match being played in Shanghai in 1858 and Dulwich College, Shanghai, has the only proper pitch in China. “In Shanghai, the cricket was more developed, but it was exclusively expat cricket — Indians and English — whereas in Beijing it was exclusively Chinese,” Min Patel, who captained MCC’s first tour to China last September, said.

Robin Marlar, the former president of MCC, who initiated and led the tour, said: “The Chinese Government want to keep the two streams apart. For them it is politically essential. They want it to become their game, not an expat game.”

“Without being too harsh, the adult cricket is at under12 level [compared with] England,” Patel said, but he was impressed by the numbers who turned up. “You know for some it is a new fad, but they qualified 20 level-one coaches at the end of the year and are hoping to do another 20 this month. If they take it into schools . . .”

The first fruits have been seen in the China women’s team. They will become the first Chinese cricket team to tour Europe when they arrive in England in August, which tickles Marlar after the storm that blew up around his comments on women cricketers 16 months ago, when he said that it was “absolutely outrageous” that women were allowed to play mixed cricket in case they got injured.

“It is ironic that the first team from China to tour Europe should be the women’s team, organised by R. Marlar,” he said. “They [the Chinese officials] said, ‘Don’t worry, we will take them into camp for three months’ and when I pressed the point they said it may well be six months. That is how they launched table tennis and swimming, in which they now excel. They just did it. The potential is enormous.”

Only one thing dismayed Marlar in China and he soon put right the fact that “nobody had told the Chinese officials that there had already been a Chinese Test player in the great diaspora — Ellis Achong, a Trinidadian Chinese.

“I think it was Freddie Calthorpe, or it might have been Charles Cobham, who got bowled out and went back into the pavilion, threw his bat at the wall and uttered the immortal line, ‘That’s the end of the game as far as I am concerned. I’ve been bowled out by a Chinaman.’ They began laughing when we told this story.”

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