“When I was at Seaford College, each Friday I would go to Sainsbury’s in Chichester and pass by the Rolls Royce headquarters at Goodwood,” says Phoenix. “But I never had the chance to go there and look at the cars.”

Sitting in her Heden Hall room as a Year 13 boarder, Chinese student Phoenix Z would surf YouTube and start to take an interest in luxury cars.

“I’d sometimes go to my room in the evening and search for videos about cars. I had a basic knowledge of cars, but these videos inspired me to start my own car channel.”

That was 2018, and seven years on she recently visited Seaford College having established herself as a well-known car influencer with over a million subscribers on the Bilibili video sharing platform in her native China.

Her love of cars, and fond memories of her time at the school, inspired the journey of a lifetime – a 20-day, 4,500-mile road trip with her producer, from the western edge of China to Seaford College in a luxury Li car.

In fact, as well as being a car vlogger, Phoenix is also a collector, and owns several supercars, along with her prized Rolls Royce Cullinan, in her home city of Qingdao near Beijing.

It’s a world away from her student days studying A Levels in Maths, Business and DT. After leaving Seaford, she went on to study Fashion Management at the London College of Fashion and it was there that she started vlogging about cars. “It was just for fun at first – something to do during the holidays. But it’s now become something I travel the world doing,” she says.

For 26-year-old Phoenix, this latest, and most ambitious, expedition connects two parts of her life – her glamorous media job in China and her teenage years being a border in far-away West Sussex.

She says: “It seems fitting that this odyssey across Asia and Europe has ended here at Seaford College. I first chose Seaford because of all the space and the beautiful campus. I remember my lovely teachers and houseparents, and when I think of the school, I have a warm feeling. I’m so glad that came here to study, and I’m so glad I made the long journey back.”