Dajing Alley

This guide to Dajing Alley in Hangzhou centers on a small wooden plaque inside a Qing-dynasty pharmacy, two characters meaning refrain from deception, written by the man who built the shop in 1874, Hu Xueyan. You'll hear how Hu, already the most spectacular gambler in nineteenth-century China's money markets, ran his own private banks and poured a fortune into this one building as a kind of monument. The guide follows him from those heights toward a single enormous bet he placed in the early 1880s, one that put everything he owned on the line. Look for that same plaque above the counter, still facing the staff rather than the street.