However, with Jiao, Internal Security had drawn a blank. In spite of their vigilant surveillance, they didn’t see a single man entering her apartment or walking in her company. In yet another scenario, she had inherited a lot of money. But Shang left nothing to the family – all her valuable property had been swept away by the Red Guards in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. Internal Security checked out Jiao’s bank account and found she had very little. She had bought the apartment outright – “a briefcase full of cash” – without having to apply for a mortgage.

For a young girl, she seemed to be wrapped in mysteries, but according to Internal Security, she wasn’t the only suspicious one.

Xie, to whose mansion Jiao had become a regular visitor of late, was another one. Xie’s grandfather had owned a large company in the thirties and had built a huge house for the family – Xie Mansion, which was then considered one of the most magnificent buildings in Shanghai. Xie’s father took over the business in the forties, only to become a “black capitalist” in the fifties. Xie grew up listening to stories about the old glories, holding parties and salons while keeping the doors and windows firmly shut. Sheltered by the resplendent mansion and the family’s remaining fortune, he dallied in painting instead of working a regular job. It was nothing short of a miracle that he managed to keep the house intact through the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-eighties, he began to throw parties at his home again. But most of the partygoers were more or less like him – no longer young, and impoverished in every way except in their memories of their once illustrious family. For them, the parties were their dreams coming true, albeit for only one night. Soon, a collective fashionable nostalgia took hold of the city itself, and the parties became well known. Some took great pride in going to Xie Mansion, as if it was symbolic of their social status. Taiwanese and foreigners began to join in. One Western newspaper wrote that the parties were “the last landscape of the disappearing old city.”