Yesterday Wimbledon rumbled a bit from deep down. The tournament gurgled, spluttered and then cleared its throat. On a day when all the fourth-round matches were played in a sort of frenzied survival-of-the-fittest, 16 players went into heat that touched 40 degrees on the show courts and only eight emerged for a quarter-final reward.

Those spit out were largely the ones expected to go, those who'd had their run, the lower seeds who just couldn't match up to more elevated opponents.

It is always like this on the second Monday, a separation point, a forcing of wills by the strong on the weak, a day that normally ends with a clearer view of what lies ahead.

What tennis can see on the horizon, never mind Wimbledon, is a growing force of Chinese players who have just broken out of their country and are now flexing their muscles in the rarefied air of Grand Slams.

Nicole Vaidisova, the teenage Czech headhunter who took out both Amelie Mauresmo and Venus Williams at the French Open, had expectations to book her meeting with Belgium's Kim Clijsters in the quarter-finals.

The six-footer, who hits the ball hard off both wings and looks a little like Maria Sharapova but repeatedly tells us she is nothing like her, failed to grab hold of her frustrations and opened the door for Na Li to create a bit of history.

Li became the first player from China to reach a quarter-final of any Grand Slam event and the first to feature in the world's top 30. She had cracked that mark only in June of this year.

The 24-year-old, who took up tennis aged eight having played badminton for two years, was also making her main-draw debut - she had tried to qualify for the tournament in 2003 but lost in the first round at Roehampton.

Li is not a name many here recognise, but as China opens the vaults and spreads cash around various sports so the great nation can reap a harvest when it hosts the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, she and other similarly talented tennis players are appearing.

After the opening exchanges, when 17-year-old Vaidisova took the first set 6-4, her hopes remained high. But the player with the shortest name on the professional tour is nothing if not a fighter, and Vaidisova, who retired fatigued from a pre-Wimbledon tournament in Eastbourne, struggled to find a consistent vein of form. Wide, long or into the net, her wayward wrists didn't discriminate where they put the ball.

Li came back to comfortably take the second set 6-1, and though Vaidisova regained her composure, she again wobbled in the fifth game of the third set.

Serving and 30-love up, she conceded four points for a service break, then dropped serve again as Li took the set 6-3 and the match.

And just to delight the tabloid armies, and not to disappoint the lovers of stereotype, Li - when asked why she won the match - even spoke to us in endearing and inscrutable riddles. "There is no solution for any match before the match is finished," she said.

The girl who lists her favourite colours as black and white had, it seemed, swallowed the script from the Peter Sellers film Being There, in which the hero, Chauncey Gardiner, spouts inanities that people take as profound.

"There is no reason for winning a match," she added.

The 10th seed, Vaidisova, was more particular about how Wimbledon 2006 failed to a be a hit after her popular spin at the French Open made her a number one to watch here.

"I struggled with my movement. In general I just felt tired on court, slow and everything. There are days when you just wake up and you feel tired and you try to overcome it," said the youngster in one of the more comprehensible reasons ever given for losing a match.

While Sharapova struggled and screamed even louder than before, she overcame Italy's Flavia Pennetta in three sets.

Justin Henin-Hardenne and Mauresmo took just two sets against Daniela Hantuchova and 19-year-old Ana Ivanovic respectively. Kim Clijsters, the second seed, also advanced without a hiccup, putting out the Polish wildcard Agnieszka Radwanska, again in two sets.

Anastasia Myskina, the 2004 French Open winner, also came through without fuss, against Jelena Jankovic, the 21-year-old who had sent Venus Williams packing in the last round.