Even as the Chinese economy has slowed and President Xi Jinping campaigns against corruption and extravagance, more of China’s wealthy elite are indulging an interest in old-school decorum, inspired partly by television’s “Downton Abbey.”
CHENGDU, China — Mao once said that a revolution was not a dinner party. But with the communist revolution turning into opulent capitalism, China’s rich are making sure the dinner-party settings are immaculate and the wine is poured just right.
Inspired in part by the “Downton Abbey” television drama, the country’s once raw and raucous tycoons are aspiring to old-school decorum, fueling demand for the services of homegrown butlers trained in the ways of a British manor.
“What they would like to say to their friends is, ‘Look, I have a butler, an English-style butler in my home,’ to show how wealthy they are,” said Neal Yeh, a Chinese-born Briton living in Beijing, who for more than a decade has helped train and find jobs for butlers.
“The country now with the biggest trend in butlers is China,” said Yeh, whose English accent would be at home on “Downton Abbey,” the series about a blue-blood family in England that was avidly watched in China. “I daresay I have played a part in starting this trend.”
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Butler-training schools and agencies have done business in China for more than a decade, but the number of recruits has grown sharply in recent years, according to those in the business. Most are Chinese and many are women. The International Butler Academy China opened in 2014 in Chengdu, in southwest China, and offers a six-week boot camp on dinner service, managing homes and other minutiae of high living.
“The Chinese are vacationing more now than ever in history, and so they’re being exposed to the West more and more,” said Christopher Noble, a U.S. trainer at the academy who previously ran bars in Cleveland. “But Chinese people see that, experience top-class personal service abroad, and they want to experience it here.”
Symbols of taste
A boom in butler service might seem incongruous as President Xi Jinping campaigns zealously against corruption and extravagance, and an economic slowdown undercuts lavish spending. But China’s rich continue amassing ever greater fortunes and want what they see as the trappings of respectable refinement. Even under Xi, butlers are finding more work as symbols of good taste, according to people in the business.
“You read about an economic slowdown, but China’s wealth is still growing,” said Luo Jinhuan, who has worked as a butler in Shanghai and Beijing since learning the job in Holland.
If butlers symbolize maturing Chinese capitalism, the somewhat awkward status they have also reflects how the rich in China must play by different rules than the wealthy in many other countries. Wealth in China, where a cutthroat business culture is pervasive, comes with insecurity about being brought low by resentful employees, rivals and officials. That wariness discourages many millionaires from hiring their own Jeeves to run their homes, people in the business said.
“Some of them discover that in reality they can’t trust an outsider to manage the household,” said Tang Yang, a marketing director at the butler academy. “They’re unwilling to have a butler who knows all the information about the family.”
Relatively few graduates of the academy end up as traditional household butlers. Instead, many work in high-end clubs, housing estates and executive floors, serving several clients at the same time — not with the same intimacy as a personal butler.
Promoters of butlers in China often point out that the country has its own tradition of high-end service, and the classical Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” features traditional butlers, called “guanjia,” or “domestic manager,” in Mandarin. But “Downton Abbey” helped rekindle a romanticized interest in old-school service in China.
Many student butlers said they had watched and rewatched the show as an instruction video on the self-effacing unflappability of domestic service. “I only began to grasp this profession of butlers after watching ‘Downton Abbey,’ ” said Xu Shitao, 34, a Beijing native studying at the Chengdu academy. “I think that in the future this profession will be quite popular and will have a market.”
But Xu and her classmates have found that being a butler is strenuous work. On a recent morning, they practiced for hours, learning to serve wine and water the proper way. Again and again, the class of eight clasped a wine bottle near its bottom and stepped forward in unison around a dinner table to dispense just enough wine to reach the widest part of a wineglass. Not a drop was to splash the tablecloth or, heaven forbid, a guest.
“Stretch, pour, up, twist, back, wipe. Try to extend your arm,” Noble commanded, using his ever-present translator. “You want to be able to extend your arm as much as possible. You’re doing a ballet.”
Students also take classes on serving formal dinners, packing luggage, cleaning house and countless other details of managing life for the rich.
“You have to get the details right to do your job right,” said Yang Linjun, 22. “Your arms get sore and your hands hurt, but this is a lifestyle.”
After they graduate, many hope to attach themselves to China’s growing number of superrich. In return, they may earn monthly wages of $2,800 or much higher as personal butlers, depending on experience and luck, more than for many service jobs.
Superrich on rise
By 2015, China had 400 billionaires and billionaire families, an increase of 65 from a year earlier, according to Forbes’ annual list. The country’s richest 1 percent own about one-third of household wealth, a share similar to the concentration of wealth in the U.S.
In addition to the Chengdu academy, the Sanda University, a private college in Shanghai, has incorporated butler training into its hospitality program. Many Chinese also learn how to be butlers in Europe.
Sara Vestin Rahmani, founder of the Bespoke Bureau, a British company that finds domestic staff members for wealthy employers, said her company planned to open a school for butlers and domestic staff people in China this year.
The number of butlers in China is hard to determine. There may be hundreds or thousands, especially in Beijing, Shanghai and the prosperous south. Rahmani said that in 2007 her company found positions in China for 20 butlers; by 2015 that number had grown to 375, including 125 with families. Others reported similar growth.
“We are in actual fact exporting to China a trade which was once their own,” Rahmani said. “With communism, everything that was refined, unique and upper-class became a distant memory.”