Beijing women sate sexual appetite with new dish of the day

Beijing is famous for its duck. Since the first roast duck restaurant opened in the city nearly 500 years ago, Peking duck - served finely sliced, with crisp skin and succulent meat, wrapped in a delicate pancake pasted with plum sauce - has been one of China's signature dishes.

Today Beijing has a new speciality: avian gigolos. For many Chinese women, male prostitutes - yazi or 'ducks' as they are known in local slang - are increasingly an essential part of a good night out with the girls. Beijing's ducks are named after their female equivalents - ji - the word for chicken.

Not far from the restaurant where Mao Zedong and then US president Richard Nixon famously shared a roast duck during the heady days of 'ping pong diplomacy', Beijing's yazi strut their stuff at one of the capital's most popular and extravagant night spots. They are easy to pick out: tall and good-looking, wearing figure-hugging clothes and sunglasses, the ducks sway to the beat and scan the seething dance floor below them.

Xiao Yu, a duck in his early 20s dressed in a tight red T-shirt with aviator shades perched on top of lightly spiked hair, is agitated. 'I really can't talk,' he said. 'This is working time.' Xu Wen, his pimp, runs a tight ship, roaming the club, checking on his boys, and ensuring that the women in the private rooms at the back get the service they're paying for. Women pay about 400 yuan to buy a duck for a few hours of chatting, drinking and flirting, he says. If they want to move on home or rent a hotel room for the night, the price rises to a minimum of 3,000 yuan.

All the yazi unofficially employed by the nightclub are tall and handsome, and they earn 10,000 to 20,000 yuan a month in a city where the average wage is 3,000.

'Ninety per cent of male prostitutes in Beijing service women,' said Xu. Although gay ducks in the city may earn more - up to 8,000 yuan for one session - they tend to operate from less conspicuous venues. At night-time, gay prostitutes' work is furtive, and mainly restricted to public parks. Women at Xu's nightclub, on the other hand, can be brazen: 'They ask outright: 'Are you a duck? Let's go outside',' Xu said.