Hong Kong gold toilet shrine to Lenin a 'dream come true'

When Winger Lam Sai-wing decided to build a shrine to his boyhood hero, Russian revolutionary Lenin, he spent more than $38 million on a fitting tribute - a solid gold toilet. The 24-carat commode, the world's most expensive, occupies pride of place inside his 3D-Gold jewellery store in an otherwise humdrum Hunghom street.

'It has been my dream to build this since I was 16 years old. Now it has come true,' says Lam, who literally struck gold after moving from Guangdong to Hong Kong when he was 21 to start up his own business. Now 46, Lam points to a passage Lenin wrote in 1921 saying that after the victory of socialism, gold should be used to make washrooms.

The toilet is registered by The Guinness Book Of Records as the most expensive in the world, but as The Beatles almost sang, 'money can't buy you taste'. The washroom is more kitsch than Liberace's boudoir, more ostentatious than Brenda and Kai-bong Chau's gilt-edged mansion and as tacky as a Peak Tower souvenir.

The doors are engraved with pharaohs, Greek gods, harp-playing angels, cherubs and a cat and dog poking their noses out of a kennel. Almost everything is gold: the two toilets, the wash basin, waste bin . . . even the loo brush. The floor is made of expensive tree fossils and the ceiling studded with 6,000 semi-precious gems of many colours. More than 100 experts helped construct the washroom.

Outside the room's imposing doors, the complete works of Lenin (translated into Chinese) are lined up along a bookshelf. One lies open on a stand, with Lenin's words underlined. Lenin's ideals appear to be at odds with the fabulously wealthy Lam who presides over a jewellery empire in the capitalist spot on communist China's bottom.

'I'm a capitalist with socialist principles,' he explains. 'This toilet is for the public, I wouldn't have one at home.'