Liwan Museum

This guide to Liwan Museum in Guangzhou centers on Chen Lianbo, an HSBC comprador who poured his fortune into a Baroque-and-Cantonese mansion in Xiguan during the nineteen thirties. You'll hear how the house became the Liwan Club, where the city's bankers and brokers gathered to smoke, gossip and gamble beside the same spiral staircase you can still climb. It traces the mansion's fall after Chen's death, first into a surveillance office and then into cramped worker dormitories through the following decades. Listen for how long that decline lasted before anyone tried to reverse it.