Asian Uncle
Welcome to Asian Uncle, the unfiltered dive into Asia - from the back-alley brothels to the shadowy underworld gang, from hardcore military life to the spiritual mystique of Tibet. This isn't your grandma's history lesson on sanitized travel guide. Asian Uncle pulls back the curtain on the continent's most controversial, misunderstood and surreal corners.
Each episode, we explore the raw, untold stories - whether it's the truth behind Thailand's nightlife, untold life of pimping in China or Yakuza's business empire. Come with me on my journey that explored the hidden and dark world of Asia that you never learned about in school.
Asian Uncle
S1E7 - China's Heaven & Hell: Working as a pimp - Season Special
Ever heard of Dongguan? Few Westerners recognize this southern Chinese megacity that operates as a manufacturing powerhouse—but for years, it harbored a secret economy built around what might have been the world's most organized prostitution industry.
Join me as I pull back the curtain on my three visits to this remarkable city between 2005-2010, where I witnessed a system so thoroughly structured it functioned like a corporation. Within a walking radius of just one or two miles, entire districts operated as adult playgrounds centered around massive KTV establishments resembling Disney palaces. These venues regularly hosted between 1,200-1,500 women each night—a scale that dwarfed similar establishments in first-tier Chinese cities.
The selection process itself, known locally as "Flower Street" (Hua Jie), involved walking through grand ballrooms with crystal chandeliers while women lined both sides wearing numbered plates. The infamous "258" pricing system made services surprisingly affordable: 200 yuan for companionship, 500 for a quickie, and 800 to spend the night—attracting middle-class tourists from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia who couldn't afford premium venues elsewhere.
But this world wasn't without darkness. Violence lurked beneath the surface, with stories of gangsters mutilating those who crossed them. The lifestyle of constant drinking, sleep deprivation, and transactional relationships created psychological effects that lingered long after leaving. Around 2015, government crackdowns transformed this landscape, replacing open access with exclusive venues where Instagram-ready hostesses now charge $500-600 just for their company.
Whether you're fascinated by hidden aspects of Chinese culture, international vice economies, or the intersection of business and pleasure, this raw glimpse into a vanished world reveals how economic development created unique social phenomena that few outsiders ever witnessed. Subscribe to hear more uncensored stories from my years living and working across Asia.
And welcome to this special episode that I've created, because I thought it was unfair to mention all this about Pimping, about KTV, without mentioning the most insane city I've been to. For people in the West you will not be familiar with the city. It's a key manufacturing and export megacity on the south tip of China, in the Guangdong province, and to locals, it was not only a megacity for production, it was also something else Prostitution and the city is called Dongguan. I went there three times, once for work and twice well, you know, to host and for pleasure, and though the majority of its GDP or its economic activity comes from export and manufacturing, as it was reported, but many didn't know that this city was so massive in terms of the population coming in for just the prostitution industry. To give you a glimpse of what I mean, before I mentioned how a KTV joint in Shenzhen was managed and how well they were managed and if that management were taken to a regular business. Well, they were managed and if that management were taken to a regular business, they probably would have done just as well. But in Dongguan's case, this wasn't just a joint, it stretched across an entire district. So within a one mile radius one to two mile radius at most walking distance, a non-sweaty walking distance you can find everything you need, from barbershops to food. It's like an all-inclusive Cancun hotel, except there's no beaches, there's just prostitutes and middle-aged and middle-income men.
Speaker 1:There was a KTV at the center of most of these so-called district and the one I went to. It was fucking ginormous. It was like a small Disney palace and I don't even mean that to exaggerate, because the minute you walked in there was like these arched doors and you walked in and on the wall paintings it was just Mickey Mouse, bugs, bunny, shit all over the wall. It was ridiculous. And it was like a playground for horny men. And only here I saw for the first time that there were no tryouts. You went to tryout and what did I mean? It's called Flower Street. It's a time for us to go pick flowers. In Chinese we call it Hua Jie. But before you even go into the room you have to go into this so-called street. It's hard for me to even explain the image. It was just so grand. It was not as insane as walking into the Colosseum in Rome, but it felt just like it because it was so hard to explain. It was like a giant assembly hall, grand ballroom, with kind of chandeliers on the window and just hanging ceiling lights made of crystal. It was beautiful.
Speaker 1:And in here it wasn't the streets that we were talking about before. There was actually not streets. Instead there were just rows and rows of women. Why one on left side and one on the right side? So when walked in, you walked in all the way to the end and it broke off and you walked all the way back, kind of like circling a ride for Disneyland.
Speaker 1:At the KTV in Shenzhen there was probably two to 300 women on every given night. I'm telling you here. I already asked the manager, so I confirmed the number at any given night there were 1200 to 1500 women in that room. It was fucking insane. The room was so big. You could hear echoes of the mama sons chatter and the fur moan, the perfume, along with the horny men. That air just stung and the scent was just so much stronger than the scent.
Speaker 1:And the girls stood in line, like me, ready to be picked out. And the mama sons here were the real pimps and they were the only ones that could speak. There was a hidden rule the girls on the line. They just stood there with their hands crossed and looked pretty, and the mama sons will grab you while you're making your way down the lines to show you their product. She would be like, ah, look at her tits, look at that ass, you know, she's young and plump sort of talk. And as I made my way very, very slowly down the aisle, I felt like I was in a garden of pure evil. It was a crazy feeling. The girls had number plates on their dress and the plates were either, of course, had numbers on them. The plates were either in white or red, and red means that they were inconvenient to go out. Normally means that they were on their period, and white means that they're free to go out. And here the girls were different. Unless it was that time of the month they had to go out. There was no 50-50 demographic split. You didn't have to convince them, it was required and it was the rule.
Speaker 1:The standard of living there was very low. Things were cheap and there was so much more supply than there was demand. There was a famous acronym known by the locals for Dongguan. We called it 258, or Erwu Ba in Chinese, meaning $200 for them to sit and chill and drink and sing with you $500 to take them out for a quickie and $800 to spend the night with you. And it was so cheap much cheaper than Shenzhen, which is only an hour and a half away that it attracted more tourists from Hong Kong, primarily the ones that could not afford to go to Shenzhen and Taiwanese Malaysians. They all ended up there and, like I said before, it was primarily the middle to lower classes that went there. The people who had money went to Beijing, went to Shanghai, went to Shenzhen, but the scene in these big cities were nothing compared to Dongguan Absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1:It was a very twisted culture, and so all you had to do while you were walking down the line was tell the mama-san your room number. For instance, she grabs you and you see number 20. You're like okay, I like number 20. And then she asks you your room and they write it down and that's it. And then she asks you your room and they write it down and that's it. And when you went upstairs, the girl will be already waiting in the room for you. But the lines took at least 30 minutes to 45 minutes to zigzag out. Like I said, just like waiting for a ride at an amusement park.
Speaker 1:The first time I went, I was with three other of my college buddies and we were so amazed and speechless by what we saw that we just kept ordering. We didn't know what we were doing. Everything just looked good to us and when we ended up back in the room, there were 24 girls there that we ordered. It was way too much and none of us even know who ordered what, and the girls could have snuck in there and no one would know. But $200 a girl for the night to sit and chill and drink with you that's like $25 for the whole night. Now, keep in mind this was around 2005 to 2010. Even then that was. You know, that's dirt cheap, especially if you're making US money spending it there. My college roommate, my buddy, said it the best. He said $25, that's like a pack of cigarettes back in New York.
Speaker 1:It was cool, too, how the hotel was designed. So the hotel was designed on the perimeter of the KTV, like if you go to a resort in Cancun, in the middle of the hotel, the Hilton, whatever it would be a pool. Well, in Dongguan, the middle was a KTV, and so it made it very convenient for you to bring girls back to your place after you drink the night out the next day during breakfast. It would just be so many walks of shame. You just see girls getting dressed, looking all busted up, guys walking down not even wanting to say goodbye and the girls walking out the side door while the guys go to get breakfast. You'd normally be pretty hurt the next day next morning after drinking all night. So we went to breakfast pretty late and afterwards we would normally end up in the sauna while walking around or going back to get some more sleep. We could not stay there for that long. Normally the trip would be four to five days before we couldn't take it anymore and, like I said, we went to the sauna. It was like a regular massage place just down the block and after we would go to this Cantonese spot for some lunch and drink some of that stomach warming soup. And what's interesting is afterwards we go flower picking again, but this time it's not at a KTV. The KTV have not opened yet. It's still early afternoon. Instead we will go to a sauna.
Speaker 1:Now this is going to get sort of graphic and that's why it's called a bonus episode, right, and you walk into this building. When you walk in, it's like a hotel. So we wait behind this kind of glass waiting area and it was kind of like a hotel setting where the rooms were all in the middle of the structure with all and then the hallway was the perimeter, the diameter around the rooms. Get what I mean? Kind of like it was just a square that you can walk around and then the rooms would be in the middle. But anyway, we'll go into what it's actually inside the room. So the flower picking here you don't actually walk.
Speaker 1:When the time came, normally around 1.30, 2 o'clock, the chimes would go off and then you would see girls in bikinis walk down the hallway around 70 to 100 of them or so. It wasn't a big place but there were many of them and then they would walk and pose and circle around the center structure and people like us behind the glass. We could see them and it was ridiculous selling sex in the open. So they also had plates on their waists with their numbers on them and then the mama-san or the manager would be standing next to you as you pick them out. You'd be like, okay, I like number five right there there and she'll write the number down. And that was that. You had to pick them out quick sometimes because there was sometimes there was not that much sheep, at times there was more wolves.
Speaker 1:I remember walking in there a little early once and there were just so many dudes in there. I was like what the hell? This is just disgusting and I felt uncomfortable, so I left. This was probably like the second, third time I went, but anyways, once you get that done, you can pick as many girls as you like and they start discounting it. If you wanted two, three, four, it will go down by like 50 bucks every time. So the entire service was like $100 for an hour and a half half.
Speaker 1:So after you go into the rooms at the center of the corridor that I mentioned before, it was a huge studio room with a massage bed in the shower. The shower room stood maybe half of that. There's a lot of toys in there like pillows and just things you could put in the shower pretty cool, not pillows but bouncy balls and you could lie there. There was a massage chair in the middle where they bathe you and massage you and, like I said before, it was an hour and a half of sexual service for around a hundred dollars a girl and one of my friends he called eight of them. It was pretty crazy, and there were certain procedures that well, certain procedures, if you will, that they have to follow as they're providing the service, and if you don't know what's going on, you are going to be in for a surprise. There's at least 20, 30 activities for them to do. Right, you can like it, you can skip it, whatever, but they offer it. You can have them dress up in stockings and rip them off, you know, have them tie them up, have them dress like school girls, you know any crazy shit you can think of, as long as it wasn't brutal, as long as it didn't hurt the other person.
Speaker 1:The funniest thing out of this experience is that once my friend came out after the service and we all came out happy except him he was very sad and I thought the service was bad. So I asked him and he just mumbled out of his mouth the number 26. I was like what he said? 26, the girl that he was with. She was perfect and if only she didn't do this, he'd marry her. Those are the exact words that came out of my friend's mouth and I was like what the fuck dude? You American kids have to come out more. It's crazy, because you came out of there cleaner than when you went in. They cut your toenails, they brush your teeth, everything. They wash your hair. It's just, it's no more, it's long gone. And so after this, we would go back to our hotels and then we would wait for the KTV to open, and that would just repeat every single day. Of course, it brought a lot of money, it brought a lot of tourists in, but it was still subjected to just prostitution, and after 2010,.
Speaker 1:Maybe around like 2015, I would say, when the government started making a more of a right turn, that's when they started cracking down on all these places, and so the ones in Sichuan are really good, the ones in Dongbei or the northern part of China, beijing, shanghai. There was a huge crackdown in that time. Not only did the Dongguan ones get cracked down, even the ones that I worked at in Shenzhen, the popular ones in Shanghai, beijing, and even the duck place that I was talking about before, the White Horse Club. That also got shut down during that era. So now a new era has exploded. Now the tip is a lot more expensive and now they charge by the hour, just like Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Speaker 1:So going to a KTV now in these big cities it's very costly. And so, for instance, you order a girl now for $500 to $600. Dollars okay, not RMB Dollars to sit there for the night to drink with you. Their face looks like all the same cosmetic surgeon. They're sitting there playing with their phones. They don't want to drink with you, they don't want to sing with you, they just want to grab their tip and leave. So for those couple hours they're drinking the alcohol, showing you attitude, and you have to tip them so much. And if you bring like five, six of your friends, you're paying three, four thousand dollars in tip just for this crap companion. So in the end this place became Not so much for entertainment but more so for a place of business where you can kind of show off your wealth.
Speaker 1:These places get cracked down every so often, depending on who the new leader of the city is, depending on what KPI they need to hit, and of course some of them are protected, some of them are not. But there's always some sort of turmoil in between and it's a nasty industry to be in. My son's godfather's close friend of mine took care of my son when he was a little kid and he used to be a professional manager at the first KTV that started in Shanghai and the stories that he would tell me would be horrifying how he managed it and how some of the fights that broke out. How he managed it and how some of the fights that broke out. One of the mama's son pissed off this gangster so much that they locked the doors in and then they slit her wrist and her achilles tendon so they made her handicapped. They cut her tendon off just to show her a lesson.
Speaker 1:So, in general, being in these places it's not a good thing. Drinking, drinking a lot, not sleeping. It changes your mood, and one thing that I did not like throughout this experience is the pressure to perform, the pressure to look at all these negative things that were going on around me all the time, and it made me want to shield myself. Even now I feel when I'm around people, I have trouble trusting them and shit, especially women. From my experience, right, because when your mind is filled with nothing but lust and money, you're not getting enough rest and you're shit-faced all day. Life is not going to go your way, trust me, and if it starts messing with your head to the extent where you start losing your temper, you start building a sense of your own world and it sometimes could turn dangerous and not everybody turns out well During these raids.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of people that have organized underground gambling. Do Texas hold them with their clients? They got bagged and then went to jail for it. It's a complete different environment now. If you go to China now, if somebody takes you there, they really think of you as a friend because it's so expensive now, but back then it was just open for everyone. So that's part of the culture that China wants to stop now and they're doing a good job at it. Do I think it should be all over the place like it was before? Probably not, but was it fun? Oh fuck, yeah, and thank you guys again for tuning into these episodes. This is the first time for me sharing this experience and I hope you enjoyed it. Please tune in for our next segment. Enjoy, have a great one, peace.
