The Bling Dynasty: Why the Reign of Chinese Luxury Shoppers Has Only Just Begun

Introduction

The New Silk Road

Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.

—Attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte, 1816

Europeans used to crave Chinese luxury goods. So seeing Chinese buying European luxury goods could be the contradiction of an era. That contradiction could last.

Two thousand years ago, the world was economically divided between Rome and China. The Roman Empire was known to the Chinese as Daqin, meaning the ‘Great Qin', the Great other Empire to be reckoned with far away on the other side of Earth. The Han dynasty of 206 BC to AD 220 built and extended the original Silk Road¹ and saw the development of wealthy merchants during what China remembers as a golden age. Roman consumers became obsessed with silk, fragrances, spices, jewellery, and anything coming from the East, really.

China was revered for the refinement and the quality of its products, and the scarcity value meant that it was acceptable to pay the equivalent of ‘top dollar' for them. As consumer spending started to weigh on the Roman finances, the Roman Senate ended up describing silk as a decadent and immoral cloth. And when the empire collapsed, the business on that Silk Road dried up.

Fast-forward to the eighteenth century: the West is still fascinated by Eastern luxury products such as tea, porcelain and, yes, silk. The British are getting ruined by paying for these goods with tons of silver and quickly find an alternative. Opium fields are cultivated in India by the British-owned ...