A chic new restaurant has opened in Beijing for the rich and privileged, called the Red Capital Club. Its appeal is nostalgia and exclusivity, with a reconstruction of a typical Beijing courtyard house in the style of the early days of communist China.
It is hard to find, down a narrow hutong in northeast Beijing, and recognisable only by the light over its red door and the security man standing in front of it. Tables must be reserved in advance.
During the last dynasty, the Qing, overthrown in 1911, the house belonged to a White Bannerman, one of the Manchu nobility, whose clan occupied two long streets nearby.
Laurence Brahm, an American investment adviser who has dedicated 20 years of his life to China, bought the 200-year-old house and spent two years on a painstaking reconstruction.
Workmen were sent to Chengde, where the Qing emperors kept a summer home, to learn how to join wooden beams without using nails.
The club acquired furniture from the Cultural Revolution reparation committees which returned items to their original owners that had been confiscated by the Red Guards. In the bar, all the furniture was used by ministers in the 1950s. Pick up the period telephone and you hear the voice of Mao Zedong, almost unintelligible because of his thick Hunan accent. On the wall is a reproduction of a famous painting of the senior leaders in 1954, celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival in Beihai Park.
Below the courtyard is a nuclear bomb shelter, built in the 1960s because of fear of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union or the United States. It is now used to store wine and decorated with the slogans of the time such as 'Dig Deep, Store Grain, Oppose Hegemonism'.