Russell Peters wasn't kidding. I have to hand it to Chinese tour operators, even though to me they present a special kind of torture. They lure you into these package tours with absurdly low prices (in my case, Shanghai-Hangzhou-Suzhou for HKD$2000, just around $260). Then they trap you on a bus and take you to places like silk factories, teahouses, gigantic jewelry stores.
Today I witnessed the latest abomination in Chinese tour scams, something I thought really demonstrated the creativity with which they plot to dupe unsuspecting tourists:
Outrageously expensive "lucky" stone lions!
I didn't understand a word of the guy's sales pitch in Cantonese (which sounded like it was positioned as a history of the stone lion in Shanghai, why they were special, historic examples of their luckiness, and how monks prayed blessings over these particular lions so they were extra lucky--with warnings not to buy the "fake" lion souvenirs so readily available in other places). Curious, I went over to a rather small lion, about the size of my palm, and nearly gagged. Y2300! That is almost $300 USD. I asked someone if they were made of some rare and wonderful material. Nope. Apparently they are expensive because of the monks' prayers that make them extra lucky. Even the tiniest lion, which would fit on a keychain, was about USD$30. I didn't even venture to look at the larger lions that people would use to flank their doorways.
But what really flabbergasted me was that people in our tour group seemed to be taking them seriously. People tell me that older Hong Kong-nese are rather superstitious, but it really surprised me when people started dropping thousands of yuan from their hard-earned money on these lions. One woman bought three of those little guys for around Y300 each, and another guy bought the Y2300 one.
Later, when the tour took us to a pearl factory, no one bought any jewelry at all. Moral of the story: luck sells, vanity doesn't.
