Six months ago, if some clairvoyant had told me that I'd be schlepping around Taiwan spending my nights in a shipping container guarding seven tigers, six Chihuahuas, five bears, four sea lions, three geese, two horses and a "killer dog" named Ludwig, I'd have said "You're supposed to read the tea leaves, not smoke them." I mean, let's be sensible. What would possess an otherwise practical fellow to leave behind a dull but safe existence in London, and head for a place where they don't speak English and aren't even meant to?

Joining the circus was never one of my life's ambitions, but the small ad gleamed from the job opportunities page of The Stage newspaper with seemingly divine providence:

Madness. Pure madness. The American Universal Circus on tour in Taiwan. Like joining the French Foreign Legion, I thought. Good or bad, I would have a story to tell – and for a writer, that is no small consideration.

"I’m off to China to join a circus." "What as?" twitted my friends, "A clown?" What will you do if you're stranded three quarters of the way around the world? Then I guess I'll have to swim the other quarter.

The heavily armed customs officer eyed me suspiciously as he inspected my passport and visa on arrival at Chiang Kai-shek airport. I remained silent. Until recently, Taiwan had been a police state, and I imagined the same people were probably still running things at his level. He snickered, espying my winter clothing. It may have been October, but the temperature was in the high twenties Celsius. A Chinese lady approached us, offering to satisfy any needs. It turned out that she worked for the circus promoter, New Aspect, but that was not the first thought that crossed my mind.

We stepped out into the sub-tropical October air, and I soon fathomed why the locals were giggling at my attire, as we scrambled aboard a coach. A stranger in a strange land, with strange people on a strange mission.

Once we’d checked in, we were ordered to attend a production meeting. No consideration was given to the fact that we'd been travelling for some eighteen hours. Thirty people were crammed into the gaudiest VIP suite I had ever seen (it had its own waterfall) waiting two hours for the people from New Aspect to turn up. At last, about ten o'clock Hsu (pronounced "shoe") Po-Yun, a man in his mid-fifties with a hairstyle that might have been "mod" twenty years ago, greeted us in halting English. "Welcome to China" he said. (As far as he was concerned, Taiwan was the real China, and he was profoundly disappointed when Britain handed Hong Kong over to Beijing rather than Taipei.)

That was it. No vital business was discussed. No instructions as to what we would be doing in the morning. The tent had not yet arrived from England, so we were told to wait in the hotel for instructions. Greg, a theatre stage hand from Leeds, quipped "Now is the winter of our missing tent!"

I was drawn into the frenetic anarchy of the place, wondering, "Am I really here? Or am I just incredibly lost in Soho?" With a population of almost six million people, Taipei was mad with motor-scooters. While the official religions were Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, the most prevalent appeared to be "7-Eleven"ism. There were temples on every street corner, and in Taipei alone there were more than four hundred fifty outlets, selling everything from dried mangoes and sushi to hot coffee in a can.

At last, the tent arrived, and we were given some sense of purpose. The site, in a park by the Tanshui River in Yungho City, had the consistency of a sand-bar. The high tension lines that crossed the grounds were set on enormous concrete piers at least six metres high. Hmm. Curious. There was a reason behind this, I was sure.

As a Canadian, I had to go to Taiwan to learn the meaning of the English expression "pear shaped". Typhoon Ivan was cutting a swath across south-east Asia and we were in its path. Moreover, and possibly more ominously, New Aspect had failed to get planning permission for the site, which was a flood plane. (I suspected something when I saw fish jumping in the puddles.) So, after four days’ work, the tent had to come down. All of it. For a moment, I just gaped in disbelief, until Ian, the technical director shouted "Come on, we’ve got work to do." We sure did.

It took us three days to get our tent down, a job that should have taken a single day. When we asked for a six ton fork lift, we were given a four ton and a two ton. Phillip, the English agent who had recruited us, demanded action. The reply from one of Hsu’s minions was, "Your problem be solved in one hour. In mean time, please ask people to keep emotion." He told them we would have no difficulty doing that. As the bus transported us to the new site, we were filled with a mixture of anticipation and resignation.

How could I describe it? Cesspool? Toxic waste dumping ground? Through the haze of fatigue and exertion, in the thick of all the construction and muck, a table with flowers on it suddenly materialised. Had we reached Nirvana? A monk handed us incense sticks and told us to hold them facing the sun, bending three times. Next they burned some "ghost money", and set off firecrackers. This was supposed to bring us good fortune. They weren’t taking any chances this time.

We barely managed to hoist the king poles before nightfall. On our first payday, I went to the company manager’s hotel room, only to find the police there. Hsu claimed that Mike and his partner Jill had stolen our wages. Sure. And Mars has representatives at the U.N.

The animals were greeted at the airport by protesters wearing tiger and bear masks. They'd already held up the arrival of our tigers. "It would have been better if you had not come," said Buddhist Master Wu-hung of the Life Conservationist Association. We couldn’t have agreed more. After they finally cleared quarantine. Paul told me my job at night would be to go out every hour and count the tigers. "There should be seven", he said. "If there aren't, then lock yourself in the empty cage." "Ah, don’t worry," said John, the tiger trainer, "they're a bunch of geriatrics".

As final preparations were being made, Gavin sent one of the New Aspect staff to buy three dozen tennis balls as a prop for the sea lions. He came back saying "Sorry, no can find tennis balls, so I brought you three dozen sun-glasses instead!"

Two American men turned up on the opening night, hoping to find Phillip. We told them he'd gone back to England, but that Mr. Hsu was here. "Good", they said, "then he can pay us the $US30,000 he owes us." They told us about Madame Maxima, a German bear trainer with the Great European Circus who was stranded here with her animals for six weeks without money for food -- human or animal -- because Hsu held on to her passport.

As he gazed over the half empty house, Arny, my boss, nodded. "Not bad", he said, "Considering they’ve not had any rehearsal." Then I saw what the back breaking work was really for, when two brown bears stepped into the ring dressed in tutus and danced Swan Lake. Hsu insisted that we remove the ring fencing, so that people could get a closer view of the bears. When Yi, the house manager objected, he sacked her. And so, one of the bears decided to go walkabout into the audience. "And Hsu says he's worried about licences", fumed Mike, the company manager.

The notice plastered across the entrance to our tent the next day showed a figure of a person with a red line drawn diagonally across it, as if to say "No Humans Allowed". This clearly did not bode well. The first person I saw was Mr. Hsu. I asked him about the sign, but he shrugged it off, as if it were unimportant. I persisted. Finally, he said "That just mean they say tent condemned…" The fire chief for Taipei County, Ho Chung-fa, had declared it "unsafe". According to an article by Jane Rickard in the 30 October issue of China News, Hsu was supposed to apply for approval from Taipei County thirty days ahead of time, and they maintained he hadn't done this. Councillor Wu Shangjiu contended the circus could face fines of between 60 and 150 thousand NT per day, wishing the amount were even higher. Clearly Hsu had enemies in high places.

There is a point beyond the frying pan and the fire, and as we came to the end of our stay in Taipei, we reached it. In the next hotel, we were expected to share not only rooms, but beds. "I ain't never shared no bed with no bloke", Arny hollered, "and I'll be damned if I'll do it for Hsu." For an hour we sat doing nothing. Finally, one of Hsu's minions arrived with a signed memorandum pledging us individual beds.

Over the next two months, we travelled to Tai-chung, Touliu and Kaohsiung, shedding several comrades along the way. Finally, after putting our tent up in the provincial town of Chia-yi, Hsu decided we would not be paid unless we handed over our return tickets. Too many deserters, Ken the production manager said. Everybody spoke at once, alcohol being a cardinal influence. While Fiona, Ken’s assistant cried "Please! English not my native language!" some junior members of our contingent began making new demands that were not agreed to by the others. I wanted to scream "Shut up!" as discipline collapsed.

Then a forty stone soprano opened up her vocal chords and released an aria – (metaphorically speaking). Vincent, Ken and another Chinese had allegedly come into Chris' room about three o'clock in the morning and began punching him. They complained that he’d been to their booking office demanding his money, and generally stirring up a rumpus. He was warned off, but persisted. They told him that if he did not leave Taiwan, they would make him "disappear". This threat was repeated in front of Mike and Phillip. The police were called, but Vincent claimed that it was Chris who had attacked him. No action was taken.

Mike resigned. Jill, his assistant and girlfriend, booked a flight for all of the British crew to fly back to London on Monday. I wanted to see how the story would end, but what would be the point if I wasn’t alive to tell it? As Paul said, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't somebody after you."

Bill and Bob, the American clowns, tried to escape, but Professor Lu saw them heading off with their trunks and stopped them. They swore they'd try again, and several other acts were expected to follow.

We met Chris at the airport. He was hiding out at his girlfriend Camille's. I whispered in his ear that I had "arranged for a small piece of shit to hit the fan".

The "small piece of shit" I told Chris about was the copy of my journal which I sent off to the China News, complete with photographs of the conditions the animals were being kept under.

I soon settled into a new job backstage in a West End theatre. After a while, I received a message on my voice-mail to call a woman named Idelette from the China News. We talked for about twenty minutes. She told me that the show was still struggling on, albeit without Alladin. They had played four more cities in the three months since we left them in Touliu, but as many more stops had been cancelled. They claimed to have played for over 300,000 people. The ticket prices ranged between 500 NT (£10) and 1800 NT (£36). Then, two weeks before the tour was intended to finish, the entire company greeted Hsu to a sit-in. Faced with living in tiny rooms with mouldy fridges and no closets, they refused to get off the bus.

Hsu was fined 300,000 NT by Taipei city council for not having proper sprinklers in the tent, and a further 50,000 NT for the inadequate cage the baby bear was kept in. The artists were sixty shows short of the two hundred they were guaranteed in their contracts, which also contained a clause that read "..[In] case of closure of the establishment, the producer will have the right to annul this contract without further payments." When they saw the state of their hotel in Taipei, it was the last straw. They dubbed it the "cockroach farm".

The following day, Taipei's Bureau of Urban Development gave its approval for the show to go ahead. One KMT legislator, representing the Jane Goodall Institute, was campaigning for an amendment to the Wildlife Conservation Act to effectively ban circuses.

Idelette van Papendorp's article appeared in the China News on 5 April 1998. She quoted my journals generously, especially the accounts of the attack on Chris. The circus finished in Taipei's Neihu district on 19 April 1998. The tent was packed onto its container and sent home.

The whole Taiwan experience is now a distant dream, and I don't think about it very often. For all the aggravation, it was the greatest work experience of my life. Forty years ago, it was a third world country, exporting cheap textiles. Now it had re-invented itself as the fastest growing economy in Asia, and its standard of living was fast overtaking Britain's. They were a force to be reckoned with.

Just don't ask them to put up a tent.

Condensed from Running Away with the Circus -or- "Now Is the Winter of our Missing Tent" Ó 2000 Mel Atkey