This is his battlefield, where he engages in hand-to-hand combat against his mortal enemy, the purveyor of sickness and disease, the fly.

Like a kung fu master with lightning reflexes, Mr Hu can literally pluck flies out of the air with his hands, sometimes five at a time. You can even hear the crunch as he crushes them with his fingers. The local vendors, reduced to swatting the flies away from their stalls with palm fronds, regard Mr Hu with affection.

He is a slightly eccentric local hero whose life is devoted to the eradication of the flies that blight their lives and it could all have ended there. But Mr Hu decided that his war against the flies should go high-tech. At the drawing board, he worked over a design for the ultimate weapon - a fly slaying machine. The ulimate fly catcher.

Six months later it was on the production line. It is a curious contraption - a slowly revolving circular drum containing sugar and water attracts the flies and deposits them in a clear plastic tank.

It's like a nightclub for flies," said Mr Hu. "They just party themselves to death." Predictably, perhaps, Mr Hu called it The Highly Effective Fly Slaying Machine. And it is a winner.