I read a few years ago of an upscale 'country club' which was being set up in Changping, just to the north of Beijing. The man behind this project claimed that he had set the joining fee at some unimaginably high level (I think it might well have been half a million yuan!) to establish his club's exclusivity, to keep out the riff-raff. And he boasted that he was still turning people away because he had so many prospective members clamouring to enrol at that exorbitant price.
I was a bit sceptical about this story, because it wasn't apparent that this chap was actually providing any kind of service or facility that might be remotely worth this sort of money, Changping is a deeply unlovely suburb, and I think even Chinese multi-millionaires might baulk at dropping that kind of money for nothing.
But it got me thinking......
You know, maybe some people in this country really do have more money than they know what to do with, maybe they really would welcome any opportunity to get rid of some of it. Money to burn.
And, as we know, the Chinese love gambling.
And thus I came up with an idea for an exclusive little club of my own (well, not that we'd necessarily need our own premises, but it would add to the ambience and the ritual, I think). I was thinking I might call it The 111 Club.
The idea is eminently straightforward. Fat cats pay me 111,000 RMB for their entertainment.
I divide the money and put it into three identical velvet sacks: 100,000 in one, 10,000 in another, and 1,000 in the last. The sacks are shuffled behind a screen, so we no longer know which sack is which. Each sack is given a mark of some kind, a number, letter, or character. And then lots are drawn to decide the fates of these three money bags.
The punter has one of the bags returned to him.
I get to keep one bag.
And one bag we set fire to.
Beautifully simple.
And I think I could ensure that I always got the bag with the 100,000 in it.... while the poor punter was happily (or not so happily) convinced that his 100,000 had gone up in smoke.
What larks! I can see some people would be coming back to 'play' every night.
Of course, I'd need a little start-up capital for something like this. Security, I fear, would be quite a big expense. Anybody interested in joining me?
2 comments:
Security, surely. Also flame-retardant clothing. And insurance. (Do they sell personal-injury insurance over there?)
Just do ONE episode of this. Even have a couple of ringers standing in for the real punters. Film it, get it to Youtube. Investors and venture capitalists will be falling over themselves for a piece of the action.
I wonder how (in)flammable a pile of 100,000 RMB, plus sack, would need to be to pull this off plausibly? Maybe you can adapt a mini-crematorium, such as one used for honored household pets. It's got to be a thorough job. They can't be allowed to find evidence one way or the other. It's got to be done.
(The fire is the genius of this proposal, btw.)
Yes, I was thinking we'd have to stuff the sacks with paper to make them all the same bulk.
Getting hold of counterfeit currency isn't too much of a problem, so if the sacks should happen to break open and expose their contents before the fire's thoroughly taken hold, it could still look pretty plausible.
I figure the sweetest ruse would be to just burn a dummy sack each time, give the punter 10,000 so he wouldn't feel too "unlucky", and clear 101,000 for yourself each time.
Hmm, I like the YouTube idea. I may think further on this.
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