While all Western eyes remain firmly focused on Greece, a potentially much more significant financial crisis is developing on the other side of world. In some quarters, it's already being called China's 1929 – the year of the most infamous stock market crash in history and the start of the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression.

In any normal summer, a 30pc fall in the Chinese stock market – a loss of value roughly equivalent to the UK's entire economic output last year – after an ascent which had seen share prices more than double within the space of a year would have been front page news across the globe.