Paul Krugman was treated like a pop star on his first trip to China yesterday. His smiling visage was printed on a wall-size poster that had huge Chinese characters that read, 'the great prophet is coming!'

Some people paid 58,000 yuan for a ticket so that they could sit in the front row to hear him speak. Those who got cheaper tickets - the cheapest ones still cost 5,800 yuan each - sat a bit far away. The passageway was full of people, and there were many watching the live broadcast sitting in three rooms next door.

Yet, the 56-year-old Nobel Prize winning economist did not seem too excited at this adulation. "I feel exhausted," he said after he made the second speech at the Peking University yesterday.