Cigars - fat, ostentatious and expensive - are returning to Shanghai. The city's new rich are rushing to buy them, along with Armani dresses, BMWs, Christian Dior perfume and holidays in the Swiss Alps, to show they're elite members of society.
It's an ostentatious denial of the four decades of dowdy communism that was a nightmare for so many Shanghai people, especially those who ran businesses, worked for foreign companies or belonged to the intelligentsia.
Conspicuous consumption is a form of revenge against the 'revolutionary' hypocrisy of the Maoist era. Before the communists came, Shanghai was the biggest producer and consumer of cigars in China, with nearly 60 factories and brands battling famous foreign names for market share.
The new government considered cigars a useless luxury, 'the tail of capitalism' - even though Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping smoked cigars made at a special factory in Sichuan province. A state monopoly took over the plants in Shanghai, cut cigar production and threw resources into making cigarettes, which became the government's main source of tax revenue.
Now, cigars have returned with a vengeance. Legal sales in Shanghai last year topped 100,000, including 70,000 from Cuba, 10,000 Davidoffs, which are made in the Dominican Republic, and 20,000 from the Wuhan Tobacco Plant, the biggest domestic producer. Another 100,000 smuggled Davidoffs entered the East China market, selling for about half the legal price.
The top brand of cigars made by Davidoff of Geneva is the Millennium Blend, whose production is limited because of the quality of tobacco required and the time it takes to cure them.
