One potent symbol of excess on the part of the American super-rich was the golden shower curtain flaunted by disgraced Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski. Among China's "tuhao", or those with loads of cash but no class (or the nouveaux riches), the lust for gilt-edged items goes beyond bathroom fixtures to include underwear and shoes, as well as 18 karat gold mobile devices costing $5,513 to $6,282. In Nanjing, the extreme represented a gold-plated Infiniti G37 that was recently photographed parked outside a jewelry store.

Such stories are grist to the mill of bloggers on websites like Tea Leaf Nation, which has dubbed the tuhao as the Chinese answer to the "Beverly Hillbillies".

In a case of life imitating a bad 1960s American TV sitcom, one of the favorite tuhao haunts in Beijing is the capital's first recreational vehicle park, where one pays $330 to spend a single night, when rooms at the luxury St. Regis Hotel are available for as low as $183 a night.