“He studied Mandarin and had taken a gap year teaching English in a remote part of Xinjiang,” Bellis said. “He walked into a classroom of about 60 kids, and one was wearing a Stockport County shirt. The guy asked the child how he’d got it, and he looked terrified and said it was his brother’s.

“Nobody had an answer, but … he went into a bar in Urumqi and there was a Stockport County scarf on the wall. The manager told him we’d been there years earlier, and that there was evidence of Stockport everywhere”.

What was born from a chance encounter in Yang Sing restaurant in Manchester’s Chinatown 25 years ago has matured into a strong bond between a mid-sized northwest outfit that had “built itself up by being creative in the shadow of two of the biggest clubs in England” and a global superpower of 1.4 billion people.

In 2004, Stockport attracted more fans to a match in China than either Manchester United or Barcelona managed around the same time.

“I used to do a talk called ‘Bigger than United’,” Bellis said. “Admittedly, bigger in Yingkou, and not anywhere else.”

Stockport’s multiple trips to China have spawned tales of rickshaw races, romance, feng shui masters, the club’s 50-year-old manager dusting down his boots to play, and cash handouts to stunned strangers.

Bellis is set to lead an 11-day tour from Saturday, with former players Mike Flynn, after whom the president’s dog is named, and Kevin Francis in tow.

“When we first went in 2001, the players thought it was an inconvenience,” Bellis said. “The current lot are all nagging us to go, because they’ve heard the stories.”

Bellis joined Stockport as commercial manager in 1989, when the club had spent years “rooted towards the bottom of the Fourth Division [today’s League Two]”. Employing a number of community initiatives, Bellis helped to swell attendances by 600 per cent and establish the “youngest paying audience in professional football”.

By the turn of the century, Stockport were in the second tier and competing with Manchester City and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

“The chairman said to me, ‘We’re selling out our corporate spaces and magazine advertising; you’re the corporate guy, what do we do now?’” Bellis said.

“I thought we should share the experience of our growth with emerging markets.”

He would soon stumble across businessman Peter Gao, “a Chinese guy with a beautiful British accent”, in Yang Sing.

Gao mentioned China falling in love with football, after the national team had qualified for the 2002 World Cup.

Bellis said: “Thinking quickly, I replied, ‘We’ve been looking at China in terms of helping an emerging [football] market’.”

Which was how Stockport home matches would come to host “coachloads of Chinese people from Manchester Business School”.

“We gave them a nice meal and got a few drinks down them, so they didn’t realise how bad the football was at times,” Bellis said. “We treated them like VIPs.”

Concluding that “China would be an exciting place to be involved”, Bellis recognised that “we weren’t a big enough brand to start pushing ourselves into Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong”, instead choosing to take the club to “provinces that people hadn’t seen”.

The groundbreaking 2001 postseason tour visited Wuhan, Sichuan and Shaanxi, with Stockport using 75 per cent of their match fees to cover three months’ UK education and coaching for 25 underprivileged Chinese footballers.

One of them, Zhang Xiaobin, stayed on Stockport’s books for two years, while becoming “romantically involved” with a Chinese female from the local university to whom the club had introduced him. He would eventually play for Beijing Guoan, via New Zealand and Australia.

“People started saying we were a dating service as well as a football club,” Bellis said.

The host at Stockport’s first dinner in China related how, explaining his belief that an economic policy should be judged only on its results, former vice-premier Deng Xiaoping said: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

“Afterwards, one of the players said, ‘Steve, where’s the cat?’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘he’s going on about this black and white cat’. I told him to forget it.”

Bellis recalls two players jumping on rickshaws in Chengdu for a race back to their hotel, with the winning driver receiving the equivalent of around three months’ wages.

Stopping on the way to a match, because chairman Brendan Elwood felt queasy on the speeding coach, the Stockport party found itself in “stereotypical Chinese countryside”. “We were in the middle of paddy fields, there was a guy carrying a bamboo pole with two baskets on his back, and we had a whip round for him. It came to about £280 [US$365].

“He was still staring down at this money as we drove off. Someone told us he wouldn’t have earned that in six months. He must have been thinking, ‘All I did was have my picture taken’.”

In December 2003, Stockport purchased half of Liaoning Tiger Star, renaming the Chinese second-tier side Stockport Tiger Star and appointing John Hollins, the former Chelsea boss, as manager.

They redrew the club’s badge in honour of Stockport’s design, replacing the English club’s two lions with a pair of tigers, and manufacturing £10,000 worth of kit.

“We were on the way to the Chinese media launch in the chairman’s [Zhou Shu Yuan] old Mercedes, and he said they’d spoken to their feng shui master, who said you can only have one tiger in any kingdom, so we couldn’t use the kit,” Bellis said.

“There are times you have to think on your feet. I said, ‘Chairman Zhou, you’ve not understood this … the tiger on the left has a yellow collar, because it’s female and British, the tiger on the right has a red collar, because it’s male and Chinese. Together, this is the marriage of English and Chinese football’.

“He said, ‘The feng shui master will love it’. I thought, ‘Ten grand saved’.”

When Stockport travelled to play their Chinese equivalents in 2004, manager Sammy McIlroy saw the 22,000 crowd and said: “I’ve got to play.”

“He was 50 and got man of the match,” said Bellis, whose brother Martin, the father of Aston Villa defender Taylor Harwood-Bellis, performed his ‘Vernon Bear’ mascot role for the trip.

Following a takeover by Brian Kennedy later that year, Bellis left because he “did not want to hang around while everything we’d built was destroyed”.

His new ventures, Lynx International, then Kick Worldwide, maintained the China link, sending players to English clubs and creating the TV show “Soccer Prince”, which attracted 130 million viewers and earned winner Jin Hui, who would play for Beijing Baxi, a place in Everton’s academy.

Languishing in National League North seven years ago, Stockport begged Bellis to return as director. “Lots of responsibility and no money, but it’s the club I love,” he said.

Under the altruistic ownership of lifelong fan Mark Stott, Stockport have climbed back to League One, where they currently sit top.

In 2024, Bellis relaunched the China tours, although the senior team are yet to return, despite players being keen to follow their intrepid predecessors.

Last year, 7,000 people watched a Stockport team draw 2-2 with Foshan’s La Liga United in Guangdong. “It had been 100 years since some British missionaries played there and they made a big deal of it,” Bellis said, adding that the visits would soon become biannual.

The latest visit will include stops in Beijing and Chengdu.

“We always used to say to the Chinese that we were copying their ping pong diplomacy that broke that down diplomatic barriers with America,” Bellis said. “This is football diplomacy.”