I’ve been in China, let’s see … seven of the last 12 weeks, so that makes me, I believe, a Sinologist. Not necessarily a Sinophile … but a Sino-expert. I know this country of 1.3 billion people backward and forward. You bet.

I have learned that the Chinese invented … everything. Just ask them. You thought gunpowder, pasta and movable type ought to be enough for a country that slumped a bit for, oh, about 500 years (right up through the death of Mao) … but, no, the Chinese invented everything. Trust me. They did. They told me.

So I have to assume the Chinese invented bread, too. Not “moola” kind of “bread” … but grain baked into loaves.

Thing is, the Chinese invented bread … badly, and actually realize they suck at it and probably ought to give it up, but they will make anything if they believe some silly person will buy it, and that’s what I did last night at a little bakery up Mercury Street, where I paid $9 Hong Kong (about $1.20 US) for a long, round stick of bread, something that might have aspired to be a baguette.

Well. Ick.

Thing is, I should have known better. See, I have been around people who have been saying, “the Chinese just can’t do bread.” Especially European kinds of bread. Like baguettes.

They sell a bit of soft, sandwich bread in stores, but it’s bad and uninspired. It’s like the Chinese gave all their attention to rice and its infinite permutations, and noodles in a zillion ways, and dumplings … and never got around to perfecting bread. Or even making it edible.

But I have this bread thing going on. Especially baguettes. When I have been in France, I average almost a baguette a day. Honest. I eat ’em plain, or turned into a sandwich with a bit of butter and some cheese.

And I’m in my fourth week here, and I’ve had about 10 pounds of rice and lots of dumplings and quite a few noodles … but I can’t make myself a ham sandwich because they don’t have any decent bread in the grocery stores (which means I didn’t even look to see if they have sliced ham) … and a baguette? Forget about it. Chinese bakeries are mostly about little pies and cookies, with a few lumpish things that might be bread getting dry under a light.

Anyway, I walked past this bakery up the block and, in a moment of weakness (at about 7 p.m., or perhaps 13, 14 hours after the bread was baked) I decided I had to try the “baguette.” I pointed to it, the bakery lady held up nine fingers, I gave her 10 HK dollars, she gave me one back, slipped the bread into a plastic sleeve … and the disaster began.

First, the crumbs. It was one of those nasty crusts that just shatters into a million flakes — like a saltine cracker sitting in the sun on I-15 outside Las Vegas as a semi-trailer runs over it.

I was hemorrhaging crumbs in one bite.

Then there was the texture of the soft part of the bread. It was rather like, oh … say, paper that has been pulped. It yielded to my vigorous chewing, but grudgingly. Bread, real bread, gives way. But think of paper … it fights you. You can’t just chew up a wad of paper (and don’t ask me how I know this; it must come from elementary school).

That’s how this bread was.

I got it up to the room, and realized it was shedding crumbs everywhere, even as I tried to nibble the tasteless thing (did I mention that? No taste? No salt. Nothing. Just bland.).

I left it in its plastic sleeve, hoping to cut down on the crumbs, which worked, but only to a point …

I stopped eating after half of the stick. It was awful, and I was tired of it. And I laid it down on the desk, thinking it would be a light-weight brick in the morning. It would be that dry. It could be a doorstop.

Then I went back to it … and for no good reason ate the rest. OK, here’s a reason. I didn’t have saltines in the room. I was bored. The thing was sitting there.

This time, I wasn’t quite as adept at catching the crumbs, and now …

I not only threw away $9HK … I not only almost broke my molars attempting to chew paper … I not only gagged down about 18 inches of tasteless paper … I left enough crumbs under this desk to make me feel as if I walked, barefoot, into a bar with sawdust on the floor.

I have been spending the last 10 minutes brushing the crumbs off the soles of my feet and taking the recovered crumbs to the sink for disposal. But I know there are scads more crumbs down there, and the serious cleaning of this place doesn’t happen until Saturday.

Mon dieu!

Anyway, I’m giving up on Chinese bread.

However! … there is a Vietnamese bakery about a half-mile from here. And rumor has it that the Vietnamese learned how to make baguettes while they were colonized by the French. And I may even give this a try.

But only the Vietnamese bakeries. And they get only one shot, and then I swear off bread completely. Unless I’m in some specialty shop with stuff flown in that morning from, say, Australia.

The Chinese do many many things very, very well. Bread, however, is not one of them. So basic. So bad.