At the gilded gates of a colonial-era mansion in the seaside city of Qingdao, in Shandong province, giggling young couples pose for snapshots, craning their necks to peer in at the sumptuous grounds and gossiping excitedly about the scandalous liaisons of the female billionaire who lived here.
'I think she's amazing,' says 24-year-old legal secretary Yan Lili, who has made a special trip with her boyfriend to see the mansion after reading Li Wei's story on the internet. 'She has proved that women can have real power in China as well as men. I wish I was as brave as she is.'
Li is the unlikeliest of heroines. Like many Chinese tycoons hailed as establishment role models, she clawed her way up from a penniless background to unimaginable wealth - but there are three critical differences: she is a woman; she made her money through at least 15 lovers in the worlds of business and politics; and she engaged in tax evasion and corruption on a massive scale, to build a fortune at one point estimated at more than US$1 billion.
When her lovers ended up in court for corruption, the Queen of Mistresses coolly testified against them. She sat out four years in detention before being released this year with most of her wealth intact, to begin a new, but very discreet, life in Hong Kong.
Her story casts a damning light on the rampant corruption that drives modern China and, with her lovers convicted in closed trials, might have remained a dirty little secret if details hadn't leaked out and caught the attention of respected Beijing magazine Caijing. The magazine was able to identify high-profile lovers and hinted that the diaries she kept throughout her astonishing rise and fall may contain the names of even more important people.
The account of how a mistress turned the tables on her powerful lovers by exploiting their lust and greed has gripped people across the mainland, where, for centuries, concubines have been accepted and kept in their place. It has inspired both outrage and admiration, and the issue of the magazine it appeared in disappeared from shop shelves as quickly as officials could scurry around to put a lid on the embarrassing saga.
They were too slow, though. Her story was circulated on the internet by citizens revelling in the schadenfreude of seeing corrupt officials brought low by a woman who started out with no money, no privilege and no power - just razor-sharp wits.
