On the approach to Li’ao village, it looks like any rural hamlet in this part of eastern coastal China. Ramshackle houses are nestled into steep hills and a graceful Chinese temple topped with dragons, phoenixes and curling gables adorns its main street.
But in the spot where you would expect the local tea merchant is a building with a sign completely alien in contemporary rural China: “I Dream of Paris Café” it says, in both English and Chinese.
Down the street is the Prato Café. Then the Venice restaurant. More than a dozen other European-style cafés, restaurants and red wine merchants thrive in this village of 20,000 that has a long tradition of exporting labourers and semi-skilled workers to the factories of Italy and the slums and Chinatowns of Paris or Madrid.